23 Harsh Truths Nobody Wants To Admit - Alex Hormozi (4K)

Today, we're going to go through as many of your lessons as we can in about three hours, and we're going to see what we can get through.

First, one a friendly reminder that in three generations, everyone who knew us will be dead, including the people whose opinions stopped you from doing what you wanted all along. Imagine that. Someone you know achieves every dream and hits every goal they have. Years later, they get old and die. Two years after that, how much do you care about as much as everyone else will? If you accomplish your goals and dreams, do it for you.

So, I think about death all the time because it's probably the central theme. It's probably the thing that I think the most about, and I think that influences how I see time and also how I think, how, how it influences agency, like what actions I'm willing to take despite the judgment of others. And so, a lot of times, it might be because I have more insecurity than everyone that I think, like, man, I want to do this thing, and then I hear all these other voices of reasons why I shouldn't do it, or why somebody else will say, like, that's bad, or yield bad, or like, that's wrong, whatever. And so, I think I've had to come up with a lot of these devices to get around my own insecurities, to take action despite those insecurities. And the biggest one that I think about is that it doesn't matter whether I achieve all of my goals or I don't achieve all of the goals. In three generations, I'll be forgotten, and the only people who were nacing against me will also be dead. And so then it's like, just do it for me. And then when I wake up every day, there's only one voice I have to listen to.

But that means that you need to be able to work out what to do from first principles. You now no longer have societal norms, or assistance, or role models, or archetypes, or expectations. And that's also difficult in a different way. I think that the more you flex whatever that muscle is of like independent thinking, the more it becomes the default way that you think. And then everyone else's action is to start looking more and more insane to you.

What, like, what's an example of that that you can think of? I mean, shoot, just the most basic ones of like living the life that you don't want, not wearing what you want to wear, not dating who you want to date, not living where you want to live. Like, you're living at home and you want to move, and your parents say no, and you don't make the move. Or you're digging a girl because she's socially accepted, you know, by your friend group, she's safe, but like, there's always some distance in between you, but you're like, I don't want to risk it, right? Or like, you're in the, the job, and every day you go there and you're like, I mean, it's okay. And the idea of just living an okay life just sounds so terrifying to me. That the freedom to fail over and over again is still more fulfilling to me, at least it feels like it's real, then walking through kind of on autopilot. And so I think that's a lot of the choices that other people make that seem insane to me now, but didn't, didn't seem insane to me a decade ago, you know what I mean? I think it's just like, as you practice taking more agency, taking more responsibility for the decisions, then you just get better and better at it. And then it just seems more and more ridiculous. You're like, they're like, I just can't quit my job. And you're like, why? Like, no, physically, why? Like, why can't you quit your job? Like, like, you know, I mean, they start hyperventilating. It's like, you could, could you move in with your parents? Could you move in with a friend? Could you split rent? I mean, I could. But I mean, other people who are going to die in a hundred years would think what?

And one of my favorite ones is, um, and I say this all the time to Layla, like whenever we're getting to some sort of like mini complaint, it's like, you know, if you zoom out far enough, you can't see the Earth. So we're talking about like, oh man, they're gonna mess up this order on this vendor's like, you know, if you zoom out far enough, you can't see the Earth. It's just like, it just puts everything immediately into perspective of how ridiculous some of the things that we're concerned about are.

Sean Puri's got this thing where he says, don't follow what most people do because you don't want the results that most people get. The average person is obese, likely to be divorced, and has less than 1K in the bank. It feels safe to do what everyone else is doing, but it's actually a terrible decision. It's like the best way to guarantee to not have the life that you want is to do what everyone else is doing, unless you want what everyone else has. With no one, which no one does. Yeah.

It's, um, being able to think for yourself and, and treating it like a muscle, I think is a smart way to consider it because in the beginning, it's really, really hard. You've been resting on societal norms and the way you've dealt with past trauma and your parents' expectations and what all of your friends do and what's accepted and all of this stuff for so long that when it first comes to you needing to step on that muscle, it's like trying to move your ears. Like, all humans have got muscles that can move their ears, but because no one works it as a child, they're just atrophy away. Uh, and this is the ear muscle of personal growth.

I think I had a lot of practice with it because I had a, so like, a lot of people have many voices that they hear that they feel are judging them, right? They have their friends, they have their uncle, they have their siblings, they have their cousins, co-workers, whatever. I think I had just one voice that I heard really loudly, and I was trying, I was talking to one of our, one of our employees the other day, and I was trying to put it in perspective, younger guy, and I was like, imagine how much you care about your mother's opinion and your father's opinion and your ship and all of those other people. I was like, and now imagine that there's literally only one. Because I had no siblings, I basically had no mother, I had just a father, and so like, his approval was literally everything. And he disapproved of the path that I wanted to take in my life. And so I think a lot of these mental faculties, these little frameworks, or these isms, just came from like, how can I combat this incredibly booming voice in the background? Because like, when I look at what I was doing at the time, like I was a consultant, you know, I graduated in three years, I took the consulting job, I did all the things. But the craziest thing was that the moment that my father was most proud of me, and he approved of my life the most, was when I was the saddest. And so that's when I was like, maybe his approval isn't the right way to feel good about life. And so that, that started basically the six-month journey of from when I decided that I wanted to change my life until when I changed it.

And I think that like, as you become more able, or more potent, or higher agency, that timeline between when you decide you want to do something and when you actually do it, just continues to compress, right? Like now, if I want to change something, I'm like, let's change it, like done. I like, I, we walk out of the things, like we're never gonna do that podcast together, I don't want to talk to this person again, or whatever it is, right? Whereas before, it's like, okay, I have to sleep on it, I have to really think about it, and like, how am I gonna, it's like, why do I care about how I'm gonna say it? This is what it is, done. And it's just like, that timeline is compressed. But the hardest one for me, like, the first one was by far the hardest. And everyone since then, the nice thing is that no matter how difficult your circumstance is, if you have like, the bigger the wall that you have to get through, is as soon as you get past that one big wall, you then can use that wall as the evidence for why you can jump over the next wall, because that will be the biggest one. And so like, after I did quit my job and left my house and and left Baltimore and didn't tell my dad until I was across the country, because I was so afraid, like people think of me as like some big alpha, whatever dude, I was like, I was such, I was so afraid of my father's disapproval that I didn't tell him until I physically left the state. Like, like, I'm not, think about that. Like I wasn't even just one state over, I was like five states over. And then I was like, hey, by the way, I'm going to California. And he was like, well, let's come over, we'll talk about it. And I was like, I'm in Ohio already. Yeah, yeah. All right. You know, then obviously he had a different reaction. But like, but then after that, it was like, what do I have to do now? It's like, oh, I gotta, I gotta sell strangers. And I was like, I told my dad I didn't want to do what he wanted. How hard could this be? And so like, it then becomes this one huge proof point. So the bigger the, the dragon is that you have to slay, the more evidence you have that you can say the next dragon. And I think that is, if there's ever been a good point for why getting over the one first hard one is so hard, is that it will then give you the reinforcement that you can do whatever you need to do next.

Yeah, the life you want is on the other side of a few hard conversations, and you're living a life you hate because you're too afraid to have them. I think about that a lot because like, whenever I feel anxious or insecure or angry or sad, I'm like, what conversation do I need to have that I'm not having? And so then, and usually, if I just think for not that long, I'm like, this is the conversation I've been putting off. And then, you know, I'm not the, the, the poster child of mental health. And so, um, I'll just call myself a pansy for not having the conversation. And then, and then I just have it. And so again, I think it's like, I need to have this conversation. And the time between when I have it versus or when I, when I know I need to have it, when I actually have it, just because it continues to compress.

And if you've ever had like, a, a breakup, or an employee firing, one of the, or quitting, if you're an employee, like these things that you dread, I don't know if you notice it, but like, the day you do it, the moment after you do it, I'm like, how many other conversations can I have? Like, I want to be like, yeah, totally. Because it's a serial killer for awkward conversations.

When I, so like, the next series of hard conversations that I had after I, I left home was actually like years later. So I had, I had multiple partners in what I said. I had a, I had a partner in one of my gyms, I had a partner in four other gyms, I had a partner in a Cairo and dental marketing agency. And all of them relied on me to make money. And so all of their livelihoods were still dependent on me, but I was splitting everything. And it was just, it was, it was horrible for me at the time. And so I remember when I, I ended up getting a DUI. And, you know, I talked to a, a performance coach or whatever. And he was like, your stress in these conversations could literally kill you. He's like, they almost did. So I got a head-on collision at 60 miles an hour, and I walked away, no injuries. Um, but it was like my wake-up call. But not to stop drinking, it was my wake-up call that I needed to have these conversations. And that's what I was avoiding when I was drinking. It was in the alcohol. What were the things that I'm avoiding that I'm using alcohol to get away from? And so, um, the next day, I had the first conversation with the first partner. And it was horrible. But the moment I was done, I was like, I gotta call the other guy. And I called the other one. I was like, this is how it is. And the thing is, is I had this backstop of my death of like, you almost just died because you wouldn't have this conversation. And so then it just gave me this courage to just be like, like, and whatever the reaction was, I was like, I'd rather be alive. I think that was it.

And so it's, it's weird, though, because death has been this really recurring theme in my life that like, the same thing happened when I was, like, the only thing that gave me enough balls to stand up to my dad, to be fair, from a distance, from the car, when I was driving halfway across the country, like, let's not make one, let's not make me too big of a hero here, um, was the idea that like, I started thinking like, every day I was like, I hope I don't wake up, you know what I mean? Um, and that was the, that was that thing where I was like, this is a big enough problem that like, if you don't want to wake up, then what have you got to lose? Exactly. And that was it. And I was like, I have nothing to lose. And that was when, that was when I think in the last podcast, we talked about this, where it's like, if everybody who's like at the bottom and feels like they have nothing going for them, reframe that as I have nothing going for me, which also means that I have nothing to lose by taking action. It makes you a much more dangerous person. And I think that was the flip that I've had repeatedly shown to me in my life that allowed me to take the step that I was afraid to take.

If I told you about the region beta paradox, have you seen that one? Okay, so this is interesting. So imagine that you had to go a mile or less, and if you did a mile, a mile, okay. If you had to travel a mile or less, you would walk it. And if you had to go more than a mile, you would drive it. Okay? So paradoxically, you would go two miles quicker than you would go one mile. Uh-huh. If you follow that rule. The important insight here is that if you only take action when things cross a certain threshold of badness, sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things. Oh, yeah. So if you look around and you see that people are stuck in region beta, this zone of comfortable complacency, right? It's the guy that sticks and it's just okay job because his boss isn't too much of a dick, but the pay isn't that good, and he's not really that passionate, but it's all right, whatever, whatever. The person that stays in the acceptable relationship, they're not that fired up, but they're not really in love, and their partner's not really got much alignment with their interests. Or the person that stays in a crappy apartment, and there's a bit of mold in the ceiling, but it's cheap, and it's in a good area of town, or whatever. All of these people would be better off if their situations were worse. Yeah, because it would give them the activation energy to kick them out of the bottom. And their only regret would be not doing it sooner.

Did I love that when I, it was funny because if I look back on the instances that were the most painful in my life, every single one of them, without fail, has created a disproportionate gain. Right? Like the most painful thing early on was for me was quitting my job and leaving, you know, leaving my dad basically. And then that created the, you know, my first, my first business in the gyms and all of that stuff. You know, getting into the DUI, the head-on collision, and like that whole situation got me out of all of these failed partnerships that I wasn't willing to do. But in the, in the moment, I was like, I'm such a failure, like I suck at everything. But that gave me the springboard when I lost everything the first time after that, that then gave me like the idea that I needed to change the business model around, right? And that's what switched me into the licensing model, right? So like, each of these time, and that became, you know, the, the first, this is kind of like alchemy. Yeah, like turning something which is worse than useless, yeah, into something that's as precious and useful as possible. You know, I'm sure you know the parable of the, you know, the man in the sun. And he like buys the son a horse, and then it falls, he breaks the leg, and then they're like, oh, it's so sad. And then the army comes, then the son doesn't die, and then it's like, oh, so great, right? And so it's one of those really interesting ones where like, whatever negative situation, and this is probably good for the audience, but like, if you think back to all the negative situations you had, like the really, really bad ones, when you expand the time horizon, most times they become net wins. And so then it just means that like, if you're in a really tough time right now, you just gotta wait. And then you get, and then you'll get your reference point back on all the things that change those results. Because most times, when it's bad, it can't get worse. So then you feel like, well, it can't get worse than this. And then your action threshold decreases, and you take and you do all the things you know you should have done anyways. And so it's like, we have this big stack of should do's, and we just wait until it's two miles. Yep. And then you just, you're like, you're just getting in the car. Like the firing conversation, and you're like, well, I just fired one person, or like, I just ended one partnership, I just broke up with one girl, or whatever it is. And you're like, who else do I need to talk to today? Really? Like, and then in like, a period, like you have these rapid periods of growth that happen. And then you have the next web of comfort, because it's way better than you were before. And I think it's, I wonder this, um, this is more just like an open thought, but like, I wonder how long, like more successful people stay in that next plateau. Like, I wonder if their threshold for action stays low. Yeah, they're immediate, like, oh, like I'm getting comfort, like how quickly they get comfortable into like, I need to change, I need to get better.

Next one. The heaviest things in life aren't iron and gold, but unmade decisions. The reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make and you're not making them. It's a good quote. Excited you said it. I think a lot of times the decisions that we make are predicated on the, on the conversations we need to have. Because usually, like, that. And what's interesting is like, you can define commitment by eliminating alternatives. So if you're committed, you've eliminated alternative actions, right? Like you can say, I'm committed, but until you eliminate other options, you're not committed. There's always a get out of jail free card, right? And so a lot of people make decisions to end relationships, to quit their job, to start the new thing, but they don't become committed to the decision until they remove the other options. And then you're forced to take action on it. And so I think actually defining those two, two different things. Now, you could define, you know, decision is to kill off, like decadere from Latin. But from a, from an, from a colloquial thing, I think there are two different instances. It's like, I need to change this, and then I do change it. Um, and the making the decision is when it becomes a commitment.

Why are unmade decisions so heavy? I think at least for me, it's because I have this hamster wheel on the, on my back of my mind where I keep playing out different scenarios. And so I keep thinking like, well, maybe, maybe I need to change what I'm currently doing. Maybe, maybe if I just rethought, like, because I'm, I'm a big frame guy, so I'm like, maybe I just need to be thinking about this differently, right? Maybe if I zoom all the way out, the Earth doesn't exist, maybe this doesn't matter. Or maybe I'm just making a problem that doesn't exist. Maybe the best action I should take is nothing, right? Like, you know, I reframe all those things. Um, but usually, it's just because I'm afraid of something. And then that's why I'm not making the decision. And I think once I name and put a face, and it's usually not even a thing that I'm afraid of, it's one person's judgment I'm afraid of. And then when I name the person, then it becomes, then it becomes real, instead of being this amorphous, like, people, society judgment. It's like, Tom, like, do I really care what Tom thinks? I guess so. It seems like I'm not making this big change in my life because of Tom. Looks like Tom's more in control of my life than I am. Dude.

So I remember this when I was 19 years old, I was super angry, like all 19-year-old men, right? That's the standard default, right? I was angry at both my parents for who, because I was 19, right? And I remember blaming them for everything, blaming them for my life, blaming for not being a better person. I literally blamed them for being a bad person. And I remember realizing that when I blamed them, that I gave them control over my life. And then the idea that the people that I hated the most at the time were the ones who actually were controlling me was the thing that most sickened me to then actually flip my narrative to actually taking control. Like that was the one thought process. My mother, I'm giving her control over my romantic life. Like my mother controls this. That I was like, no. And so like, just the idea that somebody who I was disgusted by at the time, um, had that much power is what gave me the power to start taking action.

See this hamster wheel thing that continues to distract you. I've got this concept called anxiety cost. So kind of like opportunity cost, yeah. Um, when you have an unmade decision, every single second that you spend thinking about the unmade decision could have been gotten back had you just made the decision. And realizing that it's, it's a justification for eating frogs earlier in the day. I need to answer that email. The longer that you wait until you answer that email, the more times you will think the thought, I need to answer that email. Yeah. And if we assume that what truly, truly matters in life is the time and the attention that we spend within that time, your time is being captured, and your attention is being captured by a thought that could have been gotten rid of had you have just done it. Had you have just had the conversation, broken up with the relationship, left the job, told the father, whatever, done your stretches, cleaned your teeth, had a shower, whatever it is that you needed to do. All of that anxiety cost could have been gotten rid of had you just gone and done it.

You can move through life at seven times the rate of other people by simply changing when you say you're going to make a decision from end of week to end of day. So think about how that stacks up. So it's like, let's say that there were four decisions that you needed to make. If the normal person takes a week to make the decision, and then their mind moves on to the next thing that they have anxiety for, and start making that decision, and decide another week, decide another week, decide another week, it's a month to make those four decisions. Whereas the, the super, the Superman, the takes one decision day one, one to six second decision day two, third decision day three, fourth decision day four. They aren't even finished the week yet, and they're where the other person is at the end of the month. And like, that speed of decision making, like not paying the attention cost, the opportunity cost of your time, I think it's really profound in terms of how quickly people move through life in terms of achieving the goals that they set out. Because people were like, how did, how is that guy so young and he's achieved X, Y, and Z? It's like, well, what takes you a month to make a decision, we make in an hour. And then the next hour, I make another decision that takes a year. Next month. And so like, that's how you can go 30 times or 100 times faster than than the quote average person who's overweight, has a thousand dollars in their bank account, you know, and it's gonna die at 70.

Can you just go back to before you made that first decision with your dad? Because you've mentioned it, you know, people might look at your, I would say ruthlessness, at least in some regards, with decision making, you know, hiring and firing and making these business decisions. And there's all of these great stories about, and I had this thing and I realized that partner wasn't right, so I got rid of that business. And, you know, that's the sort of thing that would tear most people up for six months, 18 months, maybe forever. Yeah. And to look at that degree of cut-throatness, or at least, um, decisiveness, I think is almost unfathomable for a lot of people. Are you a representative avatar? Is pre-leaving Baltimore Alex, a representative avatar for the average person? I think so. I mean, I was high achieving, you know, I mean, like I did well in school, I tried hard, I did those things. But in terms of my risk tolerance and my fear of failure and my insecurities, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if anything, real talk, I bet you that I have more insecurities than most people, because those insecurities are what drove me to do well in those things, not because I cared about school, but because I cared about what other people thought about me. Yeah. Yeah.

I, um, I've spoken to hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of high performers. On balance, people are driven way more by fear of insufficiency than they are with some well-balanced, perfect desire to just maximize their greatness in life. Like the activation energy for almost everybody is, I'm scared I might be a piece of what? Hang on. Oh God, I might be a piece of. I genuinely might be a piece of. I need to go and do something so outrageous that I, I can't be a piece of. There's no way that it could happen. I might be a coward. Oh my God, what can I do to stop myself from being a coward? That's the activation energy. It's funny because if you regress fear to its most basic form, it's death. And death is the greatest motivator. And like, you can prove it in a simple example. It's like, if I all of a sudden go up to anybody on the street and I put a gun in their head and I say, you know, point a gun at their head and I say, go do this thing, they'll go do it. But if I say, you can have anything you want if you do this, they're willing to go 10 times harder with a gun in their face to not die. And so if you take fear and regress it all the way down to its basis form, like that's what the insecurity is. Like, if they, they think I won't be enough. And if they don't think I won't be enough, then this won't happen. If this one happened, this one happened, I'll be alone, I'll be dead. I feel like if you just regress it all the way down, like that's all it is. And so like, the biggest achievers in life, I think have have most directly tied them not doing whatever it is that they want to do to death. If, whether they're consciously aware of it or not. And then that's what motivates them harder.

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You're not afraid of failing. You're afraid of what other people will think of you if you fail. But if you're afraid of that, imagine what they think of you when you aren't even trying. Oh, yeah. They aren't such a dick sometimes. Um, does it, is it strange to hear that you're like, angry toilet tweets read back to you now in the cold, harsh light of day? Oh my God. That was a particularly difficult poo. I was cracking. Real talk, the tweets that I have, people don't know this, but the tweets are notes to self. Yeah. So they're just erected at me so that I can look back on them and like, be reminders of like, hey, don't, don't do that. And so like, I think to myself, man, I'm afraid of doing this. And I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm afraid of what this person's gonna think about me. Because if I were to be able to fail in quiet and complete isolation, then I wouldn't care. And then I think, well, what if I, what if I, what if I don't succeed in public? What do they think then? Nothing, right? They don't think about me at all. And so obviously, that comes from the perspective of, uh, seeking to gain approval and attention from others anyway. So it's like, listen, if you're insecure, which everybody is, let's be real. Um, you might as well use the insecurity to get something out of it, right? Like, one of my, one of my favorite things about entrepreneurship is like, use what you've got. And so a lot of people think that they need to fix their conditions in order to get like, the perfect conditions before they start. But the perfect condition is whatever one you're in, because it gives you whatever assets you have. That's the cards that you're dealt. And so it's, you just play the hand. And a lot of people have great cards. It's like, man, I'm so afraid. It's like, use it. It's like, I have nothing. What makes you very dangerous? Because you have nothing to lose, right? Like, one of the, um, really interesting things about, I think about from a business perspective, but it probably applies to everything is that there's always an advantage and a disadvantage from every position, right? So like, I remember one, I mean, Jim Launch is still a big company and still continues to grow, but in the gym licensing space, there's not many people who can compete with us there, right? And I would talk to guys who are in the space, you know, talk, you know, at conferences, whatever. And, you know, younger guys would be like, well, I wanna, I wanna be in this space too. And it's not fair because, you know, you have this big advantage. And I was like, you have a way bigger advantage than I do. I was like, because if I were in your position, I would go to every single gym owner and be like, you don't want to be with Jim Launch, you want to be with Alex. You're just a number to him, like you're never going to talk to him, like you're just a cog in the wheel. There, with me, you're going to get my personalized attention. There, he's just some employee down the chain that's following some process, right? I was like, but on the flip side, if I'm talking to that same gym owner, then I'm going to say, you don't want to talk to Jimmy, he lives in his mom's basement, he has no proof that he's good at what he's what he's had. The reason that we're number one in the space is because we've done it so many times and we have a system that we know that if you go on this side, you will get this result on the outside. I was like, there's always a position and there's always an advantage. Also, you just have to play the one you've got. And most people just look at what everyone else's advantages and don't think, which one do I have?

When you're talking about it's not you that's afraid of failing. Yeah, you're afraid of other people's opinions about why you're going to fail. Like the reason I think that cynicism is so popular on the internet is that the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure. That's fundamental. It's sour grapes at an existential level, right? It is a cynicism safety blanket. It is protecting you from ever having to feel the downside of anything. I will assure my own failure in private so that I never have to face my failure in public. It's kind of like investing. Like everyone's afraid of losing money when they invest, but the only guaranteed investment that doesn't work is never investing to begin with. And so it's like, they take the long failure rather than the short one, right? I mean, it's what it is, right? You just fail long. And they're like, I prefer that. Um, that's, I mean, that's, yeah, I, it's, it's like, you and I are going back and forth on trying to figure out how many different ways can I say that either the people that you're worried about judgment are gonna die, or that you're gonna die, or that even if you do achieve the thing, they won't care anyways, or if you don't do anything, they won't think about you to begin with. And don't you want to be thought about to begin with? Like, don't you want some level of significance?

I just, you're gonna die. And I think like, I was very grateful that, so one of my biggest inspirations or whatever, you know, influences when I was in Baltimore was, I would have lunch with my grandfather three times a week. He was 90. Old guy. So I'll go to the nursing home and we'd have lunch three days a week. And listening to him talk about the regrets that he had in life, it's so much more painful to watch someone who has no options left. Like he's gonna die. It means you die tomorrow. And he died a couple years later. I mean, like, and he lost all his mental faculties, you know, almost sadly, basically when I stopped, when I left Baltimore, one of the sad parts is I was one of the only people that kind of like kept him lucid, you know what I mean? And after that, no one really, no one really visited him, no one really did anything. And so I think he, he just rolled down. I think the lunches might have been the only thing that he looked forward to. And, um, seeing someone old with no options and nothing but regret. Now, not that he had everything regret, he had things that he did really well. And I took those things from him. Um, he would, he would repeat the same lessons, you know, like every lunch, this would be where a lot of older people kind of repeat a few key lessons. And everything that he had, he flew during and he fled during the, um, during the World War II, uh, you know, he fled from the Germans and all that stuff because he had a Jewish sounding last name. Um, he wasn't, but he, it was enough that he was fleeing, right? Um, and he always used to say, he's like, you have two hands and one brain. I was like, use them. There was always this thing they said to me. And I think just like, when I would think about the things that he was going up against compared to the things that we're going up against now, it just made me feel like, all right, like, this is not as big of a deal as I really think it is. I don't have Germans at my door.

What were the regrets that you had him? Yeah, he would have spent, I mean, again, there's deathbed regrets and then there's real life regrets. But there's, there's things that he would have done differently in terms of the business. There's things he would have done differently with his wife. He had, he got divorced. Um, that, you know, uh, he would have done things very differently with his kids. So my mother, um, and her sisters, um, which actually talking to him about how he raised my mother helped me in some way forgive her for some of the things that I felt were wrongdoings that she had done to me. And so it's funny because, you know, one of my favorite quotes from Blaise Pascal is, to understand is to forgive. And like, when you, I think there's another saying that I like a lot, which is, it's really hard to hate close up. It's like, if you really see someone and you see all the things that they went through and the things that they, that happened to them to become who they are, then you understand them. And then you understand why they did X, Y, and Z. Because if we don't understand, we assume that it's because they're just evil people. And most people aren't that way. They're this way because they've been reinforced or punished for doing something like that in the past. And especially for her, she was reinforced for acting a certain way over and over and over again, to the point that it was, it was core to her character. And so when that got put on me, I was like, I hate you, you're terrible, you're evil, like, blah. But like, when I looked at it on much longer time horizon of like, she was four years old when she came here, she couldn't speak English, she got beat up as a kid, all these things. I'm like, you know what? Maybe give her a little grace. You know? And I remember when, when I came back, and it was right around that same time where I realized I was giving this person all this power, she yelled at me for something when I came back home from college, my freshman year. It was a standard fight. You know, here's the button that I press to get into the normal fight that we get into. I just remember she hit the button. I just like wasn't that upset. It's like, I felt nothing. She like hit the button, she like hit it again harder. And I was like, and I just remember looking at her and being like, I get it. I'm sorry. Like, you had a tough, tough life. And then she just broke down and, you know, started crying because it was like, she felt understood. And I think, um, I know that was a roundabout way of getting back to regrets. But he regretted how he had raised her. But his through his regrets, I got to see why she was the way she was. And then it defused the bomb that was between me and her.

Did I tell you that story? Douglas Murray told me about regrets from Christopher Hitchens. Brilliant. So Christopher Hitchens, one of the new atheists, uh, was sat in some British pub with Douglas Murray when Douglas is young. And did that, you know, you can imagine it's some musty Chesterfield sofa, he's probably got a cigarette in his mouth and it's a glass of scotch or something. And Douglas is vacillating between these two different choices that he needs to make. And he is, um, complaining, implementing the fact that I have this thing, but I have this thing, and if I do this thing, I can't do this thing. And what do I do? And what do I do? And apparently, Hitch like sat back and, foreign, "We must choose our regrets." And I was like, so I'm three Manhattans deep in Douglas Murray's apartment in Manhattan at two in the morning. And he sneaks off to the toilet. And I quickly write this down because I know that my, like, half-cut alcohol brain isn't gonna remember it. So I've known it down because that was all the trigger that I needed. Which is also a good argument for noting things down. And I reflect, I must have reflected on that for a year. I must have thought about it for a year. In life, we must choose our regrets. What the does that mean? Okay, first off, in an existence where opportunity cost is baked in, because you don't get to split test life, and by doing a thing, you can't do a different thing. I have the chosen going to the gym and going to the theme park. If I go to the gym, therefore I can't go to the theme park. Even if the decision of going to the gym was the right call, I will always have the open loop of, yeah, but what if I'd gone to the theme park? You can't ever know, right? Okay, so that means that fundamentally, regrets are baked in to our existence. And I'd always thought that the reason I had a regret was due to some sub-optimal decision I'd made. If only I'd made this decision better, I could have ameliorated the regret. Okay, so regrets are an unavoidable part of being a human, and they're a byproduct of opportunity cost, which you can't get away from. But what does it mean that you have to choose your regrets? Okay, well, if regrets are inevitable, if they're going to happen, no matter what, an easy way to look at the decision is rather than which do I want to do, which regret could I live with? Because there are certain regrets that you can't bear living with. Now, you can bear living with them, but they're going to be worse than other ones. Yeah. So what is the difference between, I need to have a difficult decision, I need to have a difficult conversation with my boss about leaving to go and do this thing, or I need to, that's the regret. That's one regret of the sitting down and seeing them face to face and telling you're going to leave their small mom and pop business, and you're the main salesperson, and it's going to be terrible, and they're going to cry, and you're going to feel like a piece of that. That's one regret. Another regret is looking back at a decade that you wasted in a job that you hate. Yeah. So in life, you have to choose your regrets. I love that as a decision-making frame because it also jump starts our fear engine because rather than saying like, what do I want? It's what I, what do I hate least? And so we get to run it. So then you get to use your run away from engine rather than you go towards doing. Yeah, the right mouse and the cheese again. Yeah. And was it you telling me that, uh, with a cat? I mean, yeah. So I'm just gonna butcher what you told me. Um, but why don't you share the, like, how much? Yeah, yeah. This was on our last episode. So this is the sequel for the people that were listening. John Peterson talks about the study where they starve a rat, and they put it into a tube. They waft the smell of cheese in from the front, and there's a spring attached to the rat's tail. So they can work out how hard it's pulling. How hard it's pulling is a proxy for design for how much it wants it. You'd think this rat is starving, it's going to pull as hard as it can. So it waft the smell of cheese in, and it runs towards it. And whatever they do, another iteration of the study. This time they.

Waft the smell of cheese in from the front and the smell of a cat in from behind. Yeah, it pulls harder. Yeah, why? Because not only in life do you want to run towards something you want, but you want to run away from something that you fear. And this ties into your, the three most common traits of very successful people: superiority complex, uh, massive crippling insufficiency, yeah, and impulse control.

So, superiority complex, I can achieve this thing. That's the cheese. Um, crippling sense of insufficiency, I fear the cat. Impulse control, I'm in a tube. I mean, there's only one direction I can go. I don't need to make a choice. Yep.

I love this a lot as a frame for for decision making. Because that, like, think about the decision that we were just talking about, right? So it's like, I'm, I'm the sales guy and I stay. And like, if you were to frame it in upsides, it's like, upside is I keep these friends, right? Um, and but I want to leave so that I can start this business, right? Those are the upsides. But when you think about it in terms of like, I wasted a decade of my life not living the life I want. To me, I mean, even when I say it, it sounds more motivating, even though it's the exact same thing. It's like losing a hundred dollars versus gaining a hundred dollars. People have three times higher loss aversion. And so it's like, if you can't get yourself to do something, think about it from the perspective of what you have to lose rather than what you have to gain.

You've got a quote that I love. "My biggest fear is getting to the end of my life and thinking I wasn't good enough." What's that mean? And I'll define good enough is I could have tried harder. Like, I want to leave everything on the field. And one of the things that has helped me a lot, I mean, in the quote that went unbelievably viral. Um, do you want me to do it again? Do I need to do it again? You don't gain confidence by saying shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by stacking, giving yourself a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are. Outwork yourself doubt. And again, a lot of the tweets that I have are notes to self. Because like, like I have a, you know, I have a big presentation coming up. We've got 500,000 people who are registered for this book launch that are coming out. And I'm thinking to myself, as like, how can I guarantee that when I step off stage, no matter what happens, I feel like I've accomplished that? I've done a good job? That I can look at myself in the mirror and say, good work.

And when I was younger, I used to have no way to do that. That's because I measured everything on outcomes. But I feel like I've got a little bit more experience. I do have a way to win now. But it's hard. And the way that I win is when I finish and I say that there's nothing else I could have done. And so that means that, like, the reason that I feel confident about this book that's coming out is I wrote 19 drafts of the book, four full rewrites end to end to make the book. I did six hours a day, my first six hours from 6 AM till noon, every day for two years to get this book to where it is now. And when I was done with the book, I was like, there's nothing else I can do to this. Like, this is it. There's nothing else. Like, I can't make it simpler. I can't make it shorter. I can't cut it. I can't add a visual that I should have added. It's done.

And sort of the same degree with the presentation that I have. I gave myself this framework of like, okay, well, if I were to speak in front of 10,000 people, I would probably spend a good amount of time prepping the presentation to make sure it was good. I was like, why am I speaking in front of 500,000? I was like, so I can, I can rationalize spending 50 times the amount of work and effort and time to make this thing exceptional. Because I mean, the numbers are hard to fathom, but that is the numbers. Like, if I had a 10,000, that's what I would do. And so it allowed me to take a presentation and, you know, I have 900 slides that I'm going to get through in 60 minutes. And I have now, every single day, I do a full draft of the, you know, I, I'd say that, say the presentation in my head. And then I do a second run where I say it out loud and I record it. And then after I record it, I play the recording with the slides up and I fix or add every slide where I stumble or there's something that should be there or visual. And I keep going until now, right now, I'm a week and change out and there's, there's not much else I can do to it. And so I'll still continue to do that from now until the day that it happens. But I probably won't have as many changes because I should just keep nailing it.

And then when I get up there, it doesn't matter if the tech doesn't work, or if the, you know, the book shopping page cart, you know, doesn't, you know, doesn't work, or whatever it is. Because I'll be able to step off stage and look in the mirror and be like, you did everything you could. And the thing is, is like, no one else will know that. Because I know that, like, I could not do that. And I probably, like, you know, a lot of people were like, dude, you have so much goodwill, you could probably just say like, cares, you know, here's the book. Um, but I would know. And if I, if I believe what I say I do, which is that I'm the ultimate judge and executioner of my own self-esteem, then I'm the only person who can say good job or not. And unfortunately, I have incredibly high standards. And so I can either just always feel like a failure because I always fall short of my own standards, or I can create a standard that I, I willingly and consciously accept, which is that I will do enough work that there is nothing left to be done. And that means that I can also do fewer things, which means I have to be more selective about the things that I choose to do. But when I do them, they will be done well and they will be done right.

They say the true hell is on the person that you are meets the person that you could have been. Yeah. And a lot of the time, I think we look at, uh, sports stars. I'm watching this quarterback on Netflix at the moment, and it's just Patrick Mahomes. He's just this artist. You know, he's, he's halfway between a warrior and a savant and an artist and a musician and then everything rolled together, right? The reason that we love seeing behind the scenes with stuff like that is it is somebody at the absolute zenith of their capacity, and they are putting everything that they can into making this as good as possible. And I think that I sometimes find myself getting, I, I certainly did before I had the podcast. I was wistful that I have the raw materials to work very hard at things and I'd never had a pursuit that I could have applied it to. There was nothing. I remember the first time I ever heard Peterson say, work as hard as you can at one thing for a year and see what happens. Yeah. And I'd never had a thing that I could work, I could work hard at business, but the line between your inputs and your outcomes is so meandering and messy that I can always excuse away good or bad performances as not being on me. And for the most part, I would take responsibility for the bad ones and not take responsibility for the good ones because that's how I'm wired. But I, I never had something that was linear. Yeah. Close to linear. I'm like, I put an hour in and I get an hour out or more than an hour out. Yeah. And it's direct.

And then about three years ago, I had this conversation with Dean, my video guy. I was like, I want to turn pro. I read Stephen Pressfield's War of Art, then I read Turning Pro. So I want to turn pro with the show. What's that mean? What would it mean if I treated this pursuit like an athlete does? So an athlete, they review game tape, and they do mindset work, and they've got a sports psychologist, and they look at what they eat, and they look at what they drink, and they go to bed on time, and they're hanging around with people that are growth-minded, and they're getting the right coaches, and all the rest. Everything is done in order to facilitate performance in the thing that they say they care about. Um, but everybody has the opportunity to do that. You just need to define what the thing is. I'm never going to be Patrick Mahomes, right? Yeah. I, that, I, no. But I managed to find my thing and then nearly kill myself in dedication toward it. There's a photo that I put up on my Instagram a little while ago, two weeks after I ruptured my Achilles. Yeah. Yeah. That's all that. And I'm in a boot, and I've got the laptop on my lap, and we've created this arm that'll bring the mic to me because I didn't want to stop doing the podcast because I'd made this commitment. I'm going to turn pro. And for three years, we haven't missed a single episode. Three times a week. Three times a week. Three times a week for three years now. And before that, it was two a week for a year. And before that, it was one a week for a year. Yeah. And it just keeps on ramping up. And the opportunity to commit yourself fully to something that you care about is beyond a blessing. And when you do it, the way that you feel once you know that you've worked hard is great.

And we said before we started, you got this big thing coming up, which I'm super proud of you for managing to achieve, even though it hasn't happened yet. Um, the difference between being nervous and being excited before you do something is your level of preparation in advance of it. If you step out on stage or in front of half a million people on a webinar, which is the craziest sentence I've ever said, if you step out on stage in front of half a million people and you've done absolutely everything, there's nothing to fear. And that's why it's not about what everyone else will think. Because when I'm on stage making that presentation, the only person whose voice I'll hear is mine. And I will know if I have done everything in my control to be prepared or not. And what's the best thing that comes out? I didn't do everything that I could to prepare, and I managed to fluke my performance, right? I managed to like, close my eyes, throw the dart, and oh wow, it hit the bullseye. You'll even know that. There'll even be guilt. You won't even be able to fully enjoy your success because you'll have tarnished it with your lack of input. And what's interesting is that when you start defining your own success that way, it actually starts to feel under your own control. But the downside is you realize that you can do very few things. And then all of a sudden life feels very short because you're like, shoot, there's like not that many things I can do before I die if I'm going to actually do my best.

And what was interesting is I was talking to a CEO friend of mine, he's a public CEO. Um, and he was like, I need to start making content. Right? I'm like, if you're like, managing a billion-dollar company, I was like, you're doing okay, man. But because of that type of person, he's like, I need to be doing better with my content. Right? He's got a few hundred thousand followers anyways. And so I was like, all right, well, how many pieces of content you're putting out a week? And he was like, well, I mean, I put out one a day. And I was like, dude, I was like, we put out 300 a week. And he just, he didn't even respond. He just took, he just like pursed his lips and nodded. He was like, thank you for resetting my minimum standard. It's always like, thank you. Like, and I'm sure, like, when you talk to Phil Heath and he talks about the volume that is required in order to gain muscle and how much, how how dialed in he is with food and all the other things. Um, just the amount of sheer work. Like the biggest change in, or I'll say biggest reason that I've had significantly larger returns or outcomes that have happened later on in my career, and they continue to get bigger and bigger, is because the minimum standard for how much work I know I can do on something has has multiplied a hundredfold. Like I look at the first presentation. So I was telling Quinn this earlier. I look at the first presentations I ever gave, and I remember thinking to myself, when I had this, I was like, this is a good presentation. It's like 25 slides with like a heading and like three bullets on each slide. And being like, man, this is good. I'm like, this is a, this is, this is a pen. This is like an afternoon. But in my mind, if I spend a whole day on something, that was like a lot of work. Now it's, I, you know, I like using this term, like measuring hundreds, which is like measuring hundreds of hours. How many hundreds of hours have you put towards something? If you do that, I promise you the thing that you're making will get a lot better. And you'll also see how much more you're capable of. Which is what I think, like my undertone of listening to what you were just saying with the podcast is like, the more you do, the more you realize you can do. And so what happens is you're actually, even though you're, you're going pro right now, you're like, dude, next year I'm going pro. Yeah, because this is now just a minimum standard. Of course, I work out three days a week. Of course, I do three podcasts a week. But dude, once we have the, the reality TV show, and we have the full crew, and we have the headquarters, like, because then the path gets lit of where you're gonna go because you're so singularly focused and you know you have no other distractions. The attention cost isn't, you're not paying that down anymore. And you're just like, how many times can I repeat this effort? And then that's when you start unlocking mastery. Right? Like, I, I have this process for creating presentations. And before we turn on the mics, uh, we were talking about it. But it's like, I've done a handful of presentations in my life and I've gotten decent at making them. But the, the process now is so refined, which is like, it is game tape. It is, I make the thing, I do the thing in my head, I do it out loud, I watch the recording, I edit the thing. I do it in my head, I do it out loud, I watch the recording, I edit the thing. And I just keep doing it until it's glass. Dude, I listen to, I listen to every podcast that I did for probably the first two and a half years. I listened back every single, every single time. But at the time, I didn't cringe because I thought, oh, you crushed it. Anybody can go back and listen to episode one with Stuart Morton in my old office in Newcastle upon Tyne. And you'll notice every other sentence that he says, I go, it's infuriating. It's absolutely catastrophic. My accent's terrible. The, everything, everything about it is is awful. And yet, at the time, I thought it was great.

Here's another interesting thing I've been thinking about recently. Um, when you don't have anything to say no to, it's easy to focus on one thing. Um, as success begins to get you more opportunities, yeah, your ability to say no becomes increasingly important. And that's something that I'm feeling now. Yeah, just more attention. There's, we're hockey sticking quite aggressively. And I'm not anywhere near like even middling Z-list fame. Yeah, but it's enough for people to see what they think is a penny stock and decide that they're going to try and throw the hat in the ring. Which means that there's like 20 things I need to say no to every single week from new people that want to, that want to do a thing. Why do we try this thing? Why don't we do that thing? And why don't we do the other thing? It was a piece of piss five years ago to say, oh, three years ago, in the middle of COVID, to go like, I'm gonna go pro and I'm just gonna focus on this one thing because what else am I gonna do? Yeah, all of my nightclubs have been shut down. I got nothing else to do with my life now. Oh, you said you're gonna go pro? Interesting. Let's see what happens when you have 30 other things every single week vying for your attention now. Let's see how committed you are.

This is my favorite analogy for this, which is the woman in the red dress. But you know, every many people have seen The Matrix. If you haven't seen The Matrix, you don't need to have seen it to understand the analogy. So Neo is going through the training program. The protagonist, Morpheus, is his educator, his teacher. And the education program only has one objective. So he's walking through the city, people are going left and right, he's bumping into people, going through like crowded New York. And then all of a sudden, it's kind of a black and white, palish look, it's green, black and white, but it's still black and white. And then all of a sudden, this woman in a red dress enters the frame, and you can't help but stare at this woman in the red dress. And she's a complete knockout. And Morpheus is talking to Neo, trying to teach him something. And as he's talking, he's like, Neo, we look at me, or you're looking at the woman in the red dress. And he says, look again. And he looks back, and it's Agent Smith holding a gun to his head. And he says, freeze. And then everything freezes in the frame. And he's like, if you're not one of us, you're one of them. And I see that as the opportunities that we have to say no to every day. It's like another woman in the red dress. And it's become a term that we use internally. Right? It's like, it's a woman in the red dress. And the thing is, is that the, the more successful you become, or the more able you become, the hotter the woman in the red dress is. Right? Like, you got a homeless girl that you're walking, you know, past on the streets, like all dirty, but she's got a red dress on. You're like, the thing is, is that that homeless girl, when you were in your apartment, actually looks like pretty hot. Yeah, right? She's like, you know, I'm not, you know, I, I could, you know, right? Um, but then the better you get, the bigger the opportunities. And that's where you have not your hypothetical 10, but what about your hypothetical 100? Yeah. And I had a mentor say this to me, right? As we sold, uh, Gym Launch, he said, Alex, you know, now that if it's not a billion, it's not worth your time. And that was such a single, a great razor for all decisions. And so people come, they're like, hey, we should do this endorsement. Hey, we should partner with this, whatever. I mean, think about it. Like, we're in the deal world. So how many deals? We get, we have 3,000 companies a month that reach out to us to do a deal. That's 100 a day currently. And we've done 13 deals in two years. And so like, if you think about from acceptance rate, it's like, you know, and I'm not saying you shouldn't apply, by the way, go to acquisition.com, apply if you have an awesome business. Um, but but the point is, is that like, you're no muscle isn't really a no muscle, it's just a yes muscle for the one thing that matters most.

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Heroes and villains always have the same backstory: pain. The difference is what they choose to do about it. The villain says, "The world hurt me, I'll hurt it back." The hero says, "The world hurt me. I'm not gonna let it hurt anybody else." Heroes use pain. Villains are used by it. And Fukudos here, this is a permutation of what, uh, Donald Miller said. Um, who's a great writer and he has a number of books. And he, he talked about the first element. The second element of that quote is the part that I added to it, about heroes using pain and villains being used by it. And so one of the things for people who are not where they want to be is that they have pain, like oodles of pain. And I remember when I was starting out, I was looking for passion, I was looking for purpose. I was like, I just want to find something that I'm motivated by. But it's the, it's the cat and the cheese. It's like, we're looking for cheese, but we have all these cats behind us. And all we have to do is look and remember that they're behind us and chasing us. And so, if you have the cat and you're staying in your current situation, you're being used by the cat, right? You're being used by the business owner who, you know, doesn't treat you well and is, you know, and you're in this job they don't really want to be in, right? Or you're being used by the situation or the context of the relationship that you're in with the girl that you're like, not that into, right? Versus saying, like, this is terrible. And because of this terribleness, I now have something that I can run away from. And then, and then, and then, like, rather than not looking at the knife or trying to take painkillers to not feel the pain, it's like completely sobering up, taking the knife and twisting it in your own heart and being like, I'm gonna do something about this. And I think that that's, that's what the heroes, like, if we're heroes in our own story, it's not avoiding pain. It's choosing from the very beginning the alchemy, which is like, you have these terrible situations, it's like, and you have the opportunity to turn, turn them into magic. And and and skip or shortcut all the growth you're going to have in a really short period of time, simply by twisting the knife and being like, I'm gonna do something about it.

Yeah, I think because people presume in the beginning that passion and purpose and meaning and joy and fulfillment are the things that get people going. But as I've said, of all of the high performers that I've spoken to, the vast, vast, vast majority of them are driven by insufficiency and resentment and terrible parents or terrible upbringings or a chip on their shoulder about bullies in school. Pick your poison. They have decided to use that to create the activation energy. Right? You can lower your action threshold and increase how many points you have to prove. It's like, oh, I, I want to live a better life. Yeah, that sounds good. It's like, I want to prove the bullies that said I was a worthless piece of shit in school wrong. It's like, that's some potent fuel. I do believe that scaled over a long enough time, it's toxic. And I don't think that it's necessarily how long, like a lifetime. Yeah, right? Like, but you, I mean, it'll, it'll fuel you for a decade pretty well. Yeah. And I think that I look at me, I look at, you know, I was bullied pretty badly in school and was an only child and had expectations from parents and, and, you know, I combined all of those things together. And I did have a chip on my shoulder. And I did want to prove to the world that I was worthwhile. And I did want people to to realize that they had doubted the wrong person. Yeah. Yeah.

Damn right. I do. I think being really specific about your pain is helpful. So like, even being specific about the cheese. Really, specificity in general is helpful. But like, even more so, like, what is the twisting the pain? What is twisting the knife? Like, what is, how do you operationalize twisting the knife? Right? Instead of being like, I hate my life. Right? It's, I hate the way Andrew makes me feel when he says that I'm a piece of shit and I'm not going to amount to anything. Comma, because he's right. Like, why does it hurt me? Like, if someone says, Alex, you're a piece of shit, you're not going to amount to anything. If someone accuses you of being polar fat. Right? I, I would have, I'd be like, I have evidence to the contrary. So this will probably not bother me. But the things that bother us are the ones that, you know, have an element of truth, or sometimes not an element, are comprised almost entirely of truth. And we just want to look at it. And so I think it's, it's the, the twisting the knife is looking in the mirror and saying, what if they're right?

Success is the only revenge. As you expand, they shrink into irrelevance. As you get louder, no one can hear them. You don't beat them, you cast a shadow so big no one can see them to begin with. When people copy, they copy the wrong stuff because they don't know why it worked to begin with. And when it breaks, they don't know how to fix it because they didn't build it. So don't sweat it. Copycats will always be behind. Good. But success is the only revenge. It is such a lovely. There's that, um, let me tell you the story behind it. Damn right. Yeah. So I was 15 years old. So this was really early in my life. Still jacked. Still jacked. Always jacked. Perma-jacked. And I, it's gonna sound so lame. So I had this teacher. So I'm freshman in high school. And I might have been 14, whatever the ages. And I'm walking through the hallway. And this, this teacher is like an admin of some kind, walks out of his office. And he's like, he's like, son. And I was like, I'm like, eaters in trouble? What am I gonna do? He's like, you work out? And I was like, no. He's like, why not? I was like, I don't know how. He's like, I'll show you. He's like, you got the genes. And so that teacher, Mr. Gibbons, um, ended up working out with me every day in high school and showed me how to work out. And he probably saw on some level that I was some angsty teenager that felt angry about whatever. And I, during our workout sessions, would be like, this guy said this to me, like, he, you know, you know, or like this, oh, whatever. And I was like, man, I'm gonna come back at our 10-year reunion. And I was like, I'm gonna show him. I was like, he's gonna be working for me. Like, blah, blah, blah, right? And he's like, no, he's not. And I was like, what do you mean? I was like, let me just have my moment. He's like, no, he's not. He's like, and you're not going to do that. Not if I have anything to say about it. When you come back for that 10-year reunion. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, because if you come back at a 10-year reunion and say, hey, John, like, everything I have, look at me now. He's like, the guy's gonna laugh and be like, you did all of this to try and prove me wrong, man. I feel sorry for you. And when he said that, when he actually played out what my, like, revenge fantasy was in real life, I realized it looked, it looks stupid. Yeah. I looked like the beta in the situation, right? And so he was like, the only thing that you can do is win so big that all of them constantly compare themselves to you. And then you'll forget they exist. And he's, and that's when he said, he said, success is the only revenge. He's like, it's not the best revenge. He's like, it's the only one. There's no other revenge because everything else is petty. Everything else does show that you were thinking about these people all day long, which means they win by default. He's like, all you can do is think about your goal and winning. He's like, and when you win, that's when you become so big that they shrink into irrelevance. You cast a shadow that no one even can see them behind you.

This is the nuance, I think, on on the previous point when we were talking about the toxicity of that fuel long term. You can see me light up. Yeah. Well, I think that when you think about, um, the activation energy of using the things that you don't like, well, you have to be careful that you're using them and that they're not using you still. And a lot of the time, I get this, and in my more juvenile moments, I, I see myself do this where I'll know that there's a game that somebody else that I don't like cares about. And I'll imagine myself playing that game to beat them so that I can stick it to them. Right? Purely for the reason of sticking it to them. Let's say that there's someone that really cares about being in shape. And I'm not in as good shape as I have been in the past. And I know that with muscle memory, if you give me 18 months and a good amount of testosterone, like the thing that they care about, I would be able to make them feel really bad about. Right? Okay. So I would hijack my own direction. Yeah. Purely to try and prove somebody else wrong. In a desperate, and somehow believe that that's me taking control of my life. Are you kidding me? I'm allowing them to ventriloquize me. Yeah. Through pain that they didn't even mean to give me. Yeah. The woman in the black dress. Ah, the black pill equivalent. Well, like now it's like, not even a distraction from your main goal. It's like, I'm gonna make a new goal just to wrong this person. And then somehow make, make up the story that I'm in control of my life when I'm, I'm really just acting in complete reaction to this person. And so in so doing, in beating them at their own game, they've already won by default. Yep. Because they got me to change the game I was playing. Forget about who won. It's like, dude, you were over there and now you're over here. I see this with a lot of people. I, I think that it contributes to a lot more of why and how people adopt societal norms. The, the resentment that they have. It's, it's not just other people want this thing, therefore I mimetically want to do this thing too. It's, I know that other people will respect me and that my resentment will feel justified and manifest if I win at it. And that's really compelling. That's like a motivational spit roasting coming in from both ends. And it's, it's really, really powerful. And you need to be careful. I mean, I think, you know, one of the really early blessings, and I'll be honest, like, this is where I think I was fortunate, right? Like, I, I realized when I was about 28, right? That I had been trying really hard to beat, I mean, you'll notice a common theme with a lot of my stories, but I have one central person that I was trying to prove for a very long time, which was my father. Um, and we're on good terms, by the way, because I always get that question. But this was after I left, and he disapproved of my whole thing. And for five years, we didn't talk very much. And so he calls me up, um, to, he says, hey, you're gonna want to sit down for this. And I'm like, okay, what are you pregnant? You know? Um, and so he says, I'm sorry. And, and I was like, for what? And he was like, for everything. Right? Now, mind you, like, it's a Middle Eastern father, born in Iran, to a middle, to a Middle Eastern father there, who was even more legit. Like, when where my father was born, women weren't allowed to drive cars. Cars came with drivers with them when you bought them. The driver came with the car. We're like, he was born in a very different world. Like fathers don't apologize to sons. It just, it just wasn't that way. And I have a little bit more, a little bit more awareness than I did then. And I can see that now. But for me, I was like, now you apologize. You know what I mean? Um, and so rather than take it for the olive branch that it was, I said, I didn't care about your opinion five years ago when I left. I was like, I don't care now. And he was like, well, we'll see how long your success lasts. And so what could have been a really nice exchange ended up becoming pretty, pretty ugly. But the, the main point there was that I wanted to, in the beginning, like, make as much as my father. Then it was making more than my father. And then it was make more than my father had ever made in his entire life. And once I had achieved that, I realized that as much as, like, it sounds terrible to say this, but like, I was trying to beat him at his game. And, and this is pretty alive in a lot of, a lot of Asian culture. Same thing, making money is a big, you know, like, when my dad would introduce somebody, be like, this is so and so, he makes this much a year. Like, it was just really clear, like, this is how much status someone has. And so like, it was really deep for me. Um, but it was only when I realized that I had won at his game that I realized I never even asked the question of like, what game am I trying to win? And I don't know how many people are actually trying to win at a game that they didn't even set the rules up for. So many when they're in it. And that's why I say, like, I think I was fortunate that I, you know, I hit a really tough goal because my dad was, is a successful man, relatively early on. Um, but that, that for that exchange, and then think, like, and then reflecting back and feeling terrible about myself from, like, saying what I said. And then I was like, I'm, I did everything that I've done to this point to beat him, beat my father, the man who actually raised me, who tried to make me the best man I can. And when I think, when I really start thinking about it, I'm like, I, like who I am, he raised me. So doesn't that mean that he might have been the perfect father? And then that really messes me. And so, yeah, so go ahead.

Well, it's just, it's hard to think that the people you used to have contempt for, or distaste, or hatred, or whatever, shaped you in a way that you couldn't have been. And I often think about how the things I'm most proud of in myself are the light side of something that I was so embarrassed about, that's so ashamed about. Um, you know, being an outcast as a kid meant that, uh, I love, or I'm capable of being on my own way beyond how anybody else is. Yeah, so far beyond it. I can work on my own in solitude for an endless amount of time. I can outwork anybody in solitude. Why? Because I spent almost all of my time between the ages of six and 16 in my bedroom, listening to audio tapes, right? Listening to audiobooks and like throwing like a tennis ball against the wall, or like playing with my like Mighty Mouse from Mars, or whatever they were called. What was it called? Biker Mice from Mars. That was it. Um, and that was what I did. Yeah. So, but I, I, all of that discomfort and all of the challenges that I went through, there are the thing, one of the things that I'm so proud of myself for now. Okay, so what if I look back and I said, well, all of the, the, um, the bullying that I went through and the challenges of feeling alone and being on the outside of social groups meant that I developed such attenuation and attention and focus and an ability to distill down what's happening socially, which is why I became one of the best club promoters in the UK for a decade and a half, right? Because for all of my school life, I'd been obsessing over how Alex wears his tie, maybe that's why he has friends and I don't have friends, or the particular brand of shoes that he's wearing, or the, like, he carries his bag on that shoulder, and I call him carry mine on this shoulder, because I couldn't deconstruct why I didn't have friends and everybody else did, right? Okay, so looking back, would I have rather had the friends, right? And had the brother or sister and not developed this skill? I can't split test life, so I don't know, right? But my life's ended up pretty good, right? And I'm happy with it. So I need to not only look back at that stuff as something not to hate, but something to genuinely be thankful for. And that is frankly something I'm still working through.

What? Yeah. It goes, it goes back to the first thing, which is like, the most traumatic events that happen in our life, you know, they happen for us, not to us. But when you expand the time horizon, like those things, and to be fair, there are people who do have really crappy things happen to them, and then it destroys them, and then that's it, and then they're just done. And that's all it is. Not everyone has like a moderate amount of childhood bullying and an only child with like parents that care about them or whatever. Like, because you were a child coping with the world with the coping skills of a child. I'm still largely that as an adult infantry. And so, but I think that, I mean, the key, the least for me, you know, my key takeaway from both, both of these kind of stories is more that all of the, all of the, the negative things that happen on the micro have the opportunity, if doubled down on, to be huge wins in the macro. And sometimes in ways that just a micro win would never have the ability to be doubled down on and become a capital W in in the macro.

This is probably one of the heaviest hammer blows I think for today. This next one. This is a real anger tweeting. No, it's not. It's an existential one. You've already achieved goals you said would make you happy. Yeah, you've already achieved goals you said would make you happy. Alex's notes to self. Right. [Laughter] Um, because we all know the happiness formula, which is, um, when this happens, I'll be happy. Right? When X, I'll be happy. Or if X, I'll be happy. Um, and so we, you know, I've set up that equation. I'm sure I know you've never set up this equation for yourself in your life. But you know, I've set that up. And I think that just serves as, as my, my biggest reminder. But it's also why I probably am a pretty existential nihilist overall. Um, because I, I've had so much evidence that none of those things quote brought me joy. But the things that we were talking earlier about anticipation being kind of the hot button on pleasure. Yep. I feel like the hot button on joy for me is what I'm doing right now. So like, I haven't done the event yet. Right? I haven't, I haven't given the presentation. But when I'm in the Rocky cut scene of like, of beating, I'm not gonna say beating the cow carcass, I'll say that was like, um, I was trying to avoid certain words anyways. Um, that when I'm when I'm when I'm putting that work in and doing the reps, like that's when I'm actually my most in flow and enjoying myself the most. And so it's actually a lie that I've been telling myself that like, once the presentation goes well, I'll feel good. Because in some ways now, I feel like when the presentation happens, I'll be disappointed because I won't get to do this anymore. I'll have to find something else to pick as a target so that I can get back into my Rocky cut scene. And so I think that that has taken some time and I've gotten better at it. I really do think I've gotten a lot better at it. Um, at least recognizing because the more, the more times I've, I've had W's and then realized that right afterwards, I felt nothing. I had to think back of like, what are the things that I enjoyed most in my life? And it's always in pursuit. And I'm like, well, then why don't I set something really big, really far so I can be in pursuit for the longest period of time possible? And that's where I think a lot of people from the outside, you know, they cast their expectations of life onto me and say, I wouldn't live my life that way. You're always, you're always working, you're always doing these things. But it's like, I'm actually always spending my time in pursuit because in pursuit is my button for enjoyment.

Well, what about if it wasn't achieving the thing at the end? If the reason that you set yourself goals is exclusively to motivate yourself to enjoy the route toward those goals? And I know that it's not the destination, it's the journey. It's kind of cliche. And I think this is is slightly subtly different, which is that it's actually about setting the destination without the destination, you wouldn't do the journey. Yeah, like the way that you set goals and then achieve them and the dopamine and the trigger that you get. Um, I often think about the balance between like serotonin Chris and dopamine Chris. And I don't even know the difference between that. It's like, am I feeling sort of lovey and present and and and wanting to connect with people, or am I driving toward a thing because I have a goal that's in front of me? And I'm very sort of dopamine Chris. Yeah, a lot of the time. Um, but I genuinely think that if you remind yourself, these are the golden years. Yeah, like this right now. Yeah. This, when you look back, these will be the golden years. Right? When I had my health, I had my full mental capacity, I had control of my bladder, I had all of the money that I needed to do the things that I wanted to crush it with my friends, to fly around America and film these podcasts, or to launch this book that I spend all of this time on. And you can even see it in the micro. You can even see it when you look back on stuff that you've done in your day-to-day business, or when you, what you did at university. What were the times that you enjoyed? Was it when success, success came to you easily, or was it when you stayed up and ordered Domino's because you had that project that needed to be in at six in the morning and you ran an all-nighter and John slept under the the table and and everybody ordered Monsters and then the next morning we got it done? What was good about that? Was it when you submitted it, or

Was it the dominoes and the 3 am sleep under the table? Because I'm pretty sure it's that. I love this. As a side note, um, but one of the things that really motivates me, or one of my most powerful motivational frames, is thinking about the person that I want to become as the destination. And thinking like, I want to be bulletproof. I want to be bulletproof in these ways. I want to be bulletproof in my marriage, I want to be bulletproof in my business, etc. And I think about that man, whoever I want him to be. Like we said, hell is when you look at who you could have been and realize that you're not that person. And then I think, if I were to make that man, what would I put that man through to make him who he is? Like, it wouldn't be easy times. It wouldn't be quick wins. It wouldn't even be easy wins. It would be the toil and the struggle of achieving and reaching for things that are right out of grasp, that are right above my threshold. And continuing to do that to, like, lift the weight, to build the muscle, to break it down, and do it over and over again. Because like, that's what creates the character traits that are the man that I want to be. And so when I'm going through those, like, really harder times, I like to think of, like, looking in my mental mirror of like, I'm making you. I'm not there yet, but I'm making you. And that has helped me get through some of the harder times.

And from a gratitude perspective, my, my most powerful frame for gratitude has been thinking about my 85-year-old self waking up as my 30-year-old self. And all of a sudden looking at Layla and being like, "Man, I remember when we were this young." And then looking out the window and being like, "Man, you know, Vegas wasn't even developed. Like, there's no flying cars yet. Like, man, they were still using gas. Like, this is so cool." And I get out of bed and I'm like, "And my elbows don't hurt. My knees don't hurt, right?" Because I'm thinking about my 85-year-old self would think. And, you know, we're talking about whatever, but it, it, it allows me to enjoy the mundane in a way that I know that I would give everything that I had when I was 85 to enjoy again. And it's just, it's a, it's a trippy frame. But like, if you can think like, "What would 85-year-old me be like? I'm just not, my body doesn't hurt, you know what I mean? Like, I actually have energy. Like, I can think clearly. I don't have brain fog because I'm 85, right?" And that has been probably my single most powerful frame on feeling grateful. And allowed me to feel more present at times when I start, like, when I start to feel like I'm going through the motions and just like clicking in the routine and just like day after day after day, and they feel the same. That's been my biggest slowdown where I can pull the reins and be like, "Just an, in my mind, you know, it lasts a few minutes. But when I think back on the days where I, when I use that frame, the part of the day that I remember was just a few minutes that I use it."

So I did this episode with Sam Harris. A lot of people have problems with Sam Harris. I found the time that I spent with him unbelievably enjoyable. I sat opposite him and a couple of times caught myself thinking, "I am having so much fun doing this." And he said this thing, and I really wish that I'd asked him another question. I should email him about it. Um, I was talking about presence and the importance of presence. And you could use it as a proxy for gratitude. And he said that really, what you're aiming to do is find small moments in the day when you just open up and realize what's happening. Yeah. Right? Like Conor McGregor won the featherweight title twice because he won the interim because Aldo was injured, right? And then he won against Aldo. And somebody asked him, "What are you going to do differently this time again, before the Aldo fight, that you didn't do against the, in the Mendes fight?" He says, "This time, I'm going to be present." And there's this photo of him and he's stood, yeah, like this, at the weigh-in. And you've got this entire, yeah, stadium in front of him. And he stood like that. He said, "The first time he did it, he couldn't remember it because he was just, yeah, drowning in the, in, in what was next." Yeah. And what I really loved that Sam said, and I think that, you know, you look at somebody that's a master meditator, or you set yourself high bars for what it means to be mindful. And you realize that you can be present with a sip of a coffee. Okay, I can be present with this one sip of a coffee. And then it, like sand in your hands, or like trying to remember a dream, it just evaporates. Yeah. Right? Okay, well, what if your goal was just to try and get five of those a day? Yeah. What if that was it? What if being mindful was just five moments when you allow yourself to be where your feet are, where your feet are underneath you? And then what if you tried to just string, like, two of those together, five times a day? Like, just this first sip. And then as I put it down, the view out of the window. Oh my God. Like, that's two things in one. And then I can do that five times. And it, if I'd asked him, I would have said, "Really, is the path to just increase the frequency of the times that you are where your feet are underneath you?" Uh, and one other cue that I love that I got from an embodiment coach is the times when you see in your peripheral vision, you're looking. And the way that our vision actually works, you're focused so heavily on what's directly in front of you. If there's ever a time when you see what's out here, you realize that it's impossible to see all of that and not be in the present moment because you naturally just opened yourself up. And I love that cue. So during the times when I'm doing things like that same episode, I'm like, "The next question." And there's millions of people watching and all this stuff. And there's this guy in front of me and he's super smart or whatever. Ah, this is cool. Just that one moment. And that, when I look back on that episode, that's what I enjoyed. That's what I enjoyed about it. So I think that being where your feet are underneath you and allowing yourself to open up and stringing those together largely allows you to enjoy being whilst you're in the process of becoming.

It's also interesting, those moments, you can capture a moment independent from your surroundings. Because a lot of times, those moments, you're not thinking about the goal that you have, the meeting that you have, the, the prep that you have to do for some talk or some podcast or whatever it is. And a camera, where I heard this, but they were talking about Gladiator, the movie. And the film opens with this, like, little bird on a bow, right, with like, the leaves and whatnot. And then they zoom out from that little bird on the, on the, on the bow, and it's this disgusting war scene, right? And so it's kind of like micro, macro, micro. Um, of how no matter how tough whatever the moment that you're going through is, if you can just take a picture of the corner of the room and look at the beauty in that, right, of being present in that moment, even if it's the suffering, right? Like, you get punched and you're spitting blood out, but it's like this moment that you capture. Then all of a sudden, like, everything fades away and you are present. And so it can take this, what would be a brutal war scene of death and dismemberment, and the thing that makes it memorable is the zooming in on a detail. Yeah. And so it's like, if we're going, if you feel like you're going through life too fast, it's like, just look for a detail.

Whenever I wanted to try and get myself back into the present, I used to have brain fog a lot in my 20s. Oh, really? And maybe not brain fog, maybe just the clarity of my thoughts now is so much better than it used to be. But I don't know, maybe it was just the drugs. I don't know. Um, but one of the things I used to, I used to have this, I still have this BMW sat on my drive with a perforated steering wheel. And I remember that if I ran my thumbs across the steering wheel and I really felt the perforation, really felt it. Or I'd do it with a leaf. I'd pick a leaf up, yeah, and I'd really feel the sensation of the leaf. I couldn't think about anything else. You can only have one thought at one time. You cannot think two things, right? Yeah. You have a supercomputer inside of your head, and it's got one megabyte of RAM. Yeah. So just think the one thought.

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Okay, so this next one, me and you text each other pretty frequently about we've seen this cool thing in someone's repurposed, like, one of the things that we've done, which is cool. And it makes me feel good that things that we've said or that you've said largely get repurposed. Um, this is something that hadn't happened before, which is you misquoted me, but improved the quote. So this was like the human centipede of content creation. And then I named it. Okay, so this is famous. Seesaw. When you're on your way up, everyone roots for you because you remind them of their dreams. When you're at the top, everyone tears you down because you remind them that they gave up on them. And you have one, which is, for anyone who needs a reminder, no one is going to hate on you for doing worse than them. And this is interesting because, kind of like the challenges you face in the beginning, you don't have anything to say no to. Therefore, the woman in the red dress is easy to say no to, or there are fewer women. Yeah. This is a challenge that nobody is going to give you any sympathy for. Yeah. It's a very unique category of challenge because the total addressable market for sympathy is basically zero. Because almost everybody is on their way up, and very few people are at the top. And the people that are at the top are seen as having a degree of privilege that almost legitimizes you twisting the knife, or you poking the finger. This is how public figures can have normal everyday people on Twitter say unspeakable, like heinous things to them, dehumanizing things, because they do not see them as human, right? They don't see them as a person. There isn't a person on the other side of this. There is, it's, they're a representation. They are a menagerie of of ideas. Therefore, I can say whatever I want to them because they're not, they're not really a person. But they are. And the fact that before there is any status associated with tearing you down, no one is incentivized to tear you down. And you haven't changed. Did the Lewis Capaldi documentary? I've watched this twice now. No, Lewis Capaldi is the singer, Scottish singer, amazing dude, really fascinating story, suffering a lot with mental health. Make this first album, and billions, billions of streams, world tour, phenomenal. And he's playing songs that he wrote in 2017 and played in working men's pubs around Scotland. The same songs go to number one. So not just that he's become better, he's the same guy. Yeah, the same guy. And maybe his production's improved, maybe his recording quality has improved, he's got better mastering, in his voice, voice coaching's got a bit better. But he's largely the same person. He hasn't changed. And he has this quote halfway through, and it really spoke to me. And he said, "Fame doesn't change you. It just changes everybody around you." Yeah. And that's when you're on your way up, everyone roots for you because you remind them of their dreams. When you're at the top, everyone tears you down because you remind them that they gave up on them. That really, yeah, that spoke to me. I wrote an essay on this because I'm a psychopath. Yeah. When I was a gym owner. So a lot of people don't know this, but I got a writing scholarship in college. Like, I was a vice president of the newspaper, I was, uh, editor of the creative writing magazine. So like, I've been writing for a long time. I enjoy writing. Um, and I wrote this essay. I said, I think the title of it was, um, "Everyone Believes in the American Dream Until It Comes True." And I remember because what had happened was, everybody when I, when I was sleeping on the gym floor, right? Like, you know, I was the, I was the underdog. And everyone, you know, my clients were all like, "Oh, good for you. You know, you're going after your dream." They'd see my blanket and my pillow in the corner of the gym, and they knew I was sleeping there, and it was evident. You know, I, I lived there. Um, I didn't have a shower. I had to go to the YMCA to go shower. Um, and that everybody was like, "Pro me." And then people come in, they sign up, like, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna support you." Right? And then within nine months, I had hired people and I had a manager. And I pulled up. And I remember I walked in the lobby, and all the same, the same people were like, "Ah, boss man's here. Oh, you're not too good for us now, right?" And I remember being so jarred by the experience. And I was like, "You guys rooted for me." And I was like, "And now I, I did what you said you were rooting for me to do." And that was when I realized that people want you to do well, but not better than them. And I was like, "I had gone from underdog to the man." And I was like, "When does that happen?" And the litmus test of when it happens is depends on who the person is. Because for the person who was working at my gym, who, you know, was a janitor or a cleaner, it happened really quick, right? For the people who were more successful, uh, it took longer. And then, you know, the only people at the end who would still for me were the business owners who were doing way better than me, right? Who were still members of my gym. And so that was a really interesting experience that happened when I was 23. And that was the first time I went from underdog to the person that someone would want to attack. But I had a performance coach tell me this. He said, "Hatred isn't isn't something you avoid. He said, it is a requisite for success. He said, if you get no hate, you are not successful." And for some reason, that just like, really stuck with me. Because then it just like, rather than it being this thing that I was trying to avoid, it actually became a leading indicator, or an indicator that I was on the right path in achieving things. And so I think that's why, I mean, I, I don't, I don't want two horns or anything. Um, but in terms of, like, my ability to deal with the naysayers and things like that, I feel like I'm pretty good at it. Like, it doesn't really bug me very much. Um, and I think in large part, it was because of how it's framed, at least how, you know, in this discussion, how it was framed for me early on, which is that no one hates you from above. And even, you know, even when I think back about, like, the bullies and whatnot that you had earlier, like, even in middle school, like, there were things that I had that were going for me that I couldn't recognize. Because of course, everything that comes easy to you are things that they're easy to use. You don't think that they're, you know, new or interesting or cool. But, like, at the same time, I was like, I'd advanced a grade in multiple, in multiple subjects. I had, you know, straight A's. I worked really hard. I was in shape, right? And I, but I had these people who would hate. But I, you know, you internalize it. But like, now I can look back and be like, it's kind of like the, the parents were like, "It's because she's into you, right?" No, it might not be the same that way. But, but just thinking about it as an indicator that the hate is actually the light that you're on the right path.

We spoke about this last time, that nothing is going to be worthwhile that doesn't come with an associated amount of discomfort. Therefore, when you start to feel friends around you and the people that you used to be able to speak a common language with start to push back and start to make the quips of, "Oh, not drinking tonight, yeah? Oh, you must be too cool for us now." I know it hurts. I know it hurts. That is the lead indicator, not even the lagging indicator, that is the lead indicator that you're doing the right thing. And a lot of people listen to this podcast. I get messages from people like, "Hey man, I'm a 22-year-old rugby player from the Northwest of, of the UK. I live in Cumbria. None of my friends understand me. I want to do personal growth. I don't want to live in the UK." And when I listen to Modern Wisdom, Fearless Alone, and it, it makes me tear up because I'm like, like, I see me in that person. I see me in that. And the, it's so hard to reframe it. The pushback you are getting is the indicator that you are doing the right thing. It is. And if you can reframe the distaste that you get from other people as the same as that, because they're projecting the things that they know they should be doing that you are doing that they're not doing, and you remind them of that. And so it's that, it's even, so even though the mountain that you're climbing is actually a smaller one than the one that you ultimately want to climb, you're actually at the top of their mountain. And so they start tearing you down. So like, that's where the, the underdog story that we said the very beginning of this with the quote, which is like, on the way up, they root for you. And then when you're at the top, they try and tear you down because you remind them of the dreams that they couldn't accomplish, right? And so you quitting drinking, or you staying in to work on your side hustle, or your project, or the business that you want to launch, the podcast that might be, you might be at the top of their mountain. And so they are tearing you down because now you remind them that they haven't done it. And it's purely a projection of them onto you and has nothing to do with you. And that, I hope that that comforts someone. Because what you said, I think, is like, if you're going through that right now, and like, and I promise you, every single person who wants to do something with their life and has done something with their life has gone through the exact chapter that you're going through. And it's the lonely chapter. It's the chapter where you, you don't fit in with your own friends, but you don't have the outcomes yet to fit into a new group of friends. And you're doing this thing, you're consuming content on the internet, you're, you're doing these free tutorials online to try and figure out how to set up a podcast and where do I host this thing? And then there, and, and you're going through this and you're like, "Am I, is this even worth it?" Because you have no signs of success. Right? But if there's anything that you can take away from what we're saying right now, is that the sign of success is the hate that you get along the way. And what you can't do is bend the knee to their hate and fit back into the conformity because it's comfortable and it's warm. Because like in The Matrix, when Trinity opens the door, when when Neo's about to go take the red pill, and he wants to get out of the car, she says, "Neo, you've been down that road and you know exactly where it leads. And I know that's not where you want to be." And then he closes the door. Like, right now, this moment that you're going through is Trinity opening the door and being like, "You could go back." But then you'd have to remember exactly what the reason was that you decided not to go out to begin with. Is because you listen to this podcast and you consume this content, you're like, "I can do more than this." Like, because you are starting to live in some of that, how where you look in the mirror and you're like, "I can do more." And you start to see the person that you could be. And you're like, "This does start to feel like hell." The reason that it's uncomfortable, and the reason that I do have sympathy for the people that see this is ignorance, in some regards, is bliss. As soon as you begin to posit an ideal, yeah, you then begin to compare yourself to that ideal. And the gap in potential between you and the person that you could have been begins to get more stuck. And even the slightest glimmer of, "Wow, I can, I can read a book or follow a course or listen to a podcast and then work really, really hard on one thing and change the thermodynamics of my mind, change the texture of my own existence day to day because I worked at a thing and now I understand nutrition." You know, "I know Kung Fu." Like, I, I understand nutrition, or I can, I understand how to sleep well. Okay. As soon as you know that sleep is important and what you need to do to do it, every single night of bad sleep that you have is on you. Yeah. Because before you had the excuse that you're ignorant. Yeah. And guess what? Now you don't. Every worthwhile goal is worthwhile because it has a cost associated with it. And so the cost that you're going through is what makes the goal worthwhile to begin with. Because if what you are setting out to do were immediately available to you, then it would mean it would be immediately available to everyone, which means it wouldn't be worthwhile. So the very fact that it's difficult is why it is worth doing. And so like, we can't resent the price tag of the shoes that we want to buy. We just have to make the decision whether or not we want to pay it.

There's another real hammer blow. You don't get very touchy-feely with, like, you know, I live in Austin now, so I'm like, in, in the psychedelic Mecca of the United States. And people talk a lot about like trauma and and improvement and stuff like that. Self-love is holding yourself to a higher standard than anyone else does. That's really interesting to me. I think it's believing in the 85-year-old version of you who's exactly who you want to be. And then ruthlessly looking at the discrepancy between the, the pittance of a human that you are now compared to that man or that woman. And then step by step, breaking down the many differences and starting on the first one and pulling the thread. I love the idea that in a truth, true self-love, a lot of the time is wrapped in acceptance and a degree of belonging. I reject this entirely. I just want to, I just want to throw it out there. That doesn't surprise me. The idea that self-love is holding yourself to a higher standard than anyone else does. You believing in you more than anybody else does is such a first principles way of looking at self-love. Okay, so I'm supposed to love myself. I'm supposed to support myself and be my biggest fan. But I don't have the most belief in me. So I'm supposed to have self-love, but I cap my own potential. I have so many thoughts. So right off the bat, even the concept of fan was something that I, if I was, if you're, if I was talking to 2013, 2012 Alex, I would have rejected that notion. Not like the, the concept of even being a fan of myself was so foreign to me. It wouldn't have been real to me. And so I'll tell you what that Alex internalized, which was that I didn't need to deserve success, but I could still have it if I did the things that created success. And so it felt like a cheat code where I was like, "I can actually be a shitty person and horrible and suck at everything, but if I still work out and I still eat this way, I can still look this way, even though I don't deserve it." And that was like the first, it actually felt like I was like, if for anybody who hates themselves, you can hear me. Um, that was like my first big shade, my first solace, my first foothold that I started getting on success was that I didn't need to deserve it. I could still have it anyways. And that was like very empowering for me. The other thing that you said about acceptance. So there's this big movement around self-acceptance. And I want to say that I wholeheartedly reject it. I, you accept outcomes and you accept circumstances. You accept the fact that you were dealt whatever hand you were dealt. You accept that you're five eight. You accept that you're black. You accept that you're a woman. That's accepting. You trying to rebel against that is you trying to fight the universe, and the universe is going to win every time. But in terms of you framing acceptance as saying that I am comfortable with who I am and I cannot be better and I must be satisfied with that, is the biggest embodiment of failure that I can imagine. Is that it's almost, it's almost, it's almost egotistical to say that there's a difference between saying, "I am good enough" and "I am good." So you could say, "I am good enough" for my current state based on the work that I've put into it, but I could be better. And so, like, you can accept that the work that you have done has created the outcome that you've created, but you do not need to accept that the outcome that you've created is the end-all, be-all, and the last outcome that you need to need to have. And so for me, like, the only version of acceptance that I have is that I accept that the version of myself that I want to be is, is so far from who I am that I have this massive discrepancy that I have to overcome. And then just breaking that down one step at a time and thinking, "I don't, I don't deserve to be that man, but I can still do the things that can create it." And it also means that I have to go through the circumstances that that would create that man. Which means that if I have unbelievable big dreams and big goals, then I have to go through hard times. It's like, hate the hard times are a requisite for success. And so if you're going through hard times right now, it means that you're on the path to success. And it's not that you're on the wrong path, it's the feeling of being on the right path.

And one of the things that I talk with with the CEOs in our portfolio company, and I'm, I'm going to bring it back. One of our companies, they were struggling with growth, big company. And he was like, "I honestly, the issue that I have right now," he's like, "I, I don't know how many locations I can open every month." He's like, "Based on the cash flow that's coming in and out." And I was like, "This is kind of like the Morpheus free front." But I was like, "I need you to freeze this moment." I was like, "The feeling that you have right now is that you are missing a finance function." Is that they didn't have a good finance leader. And you're like, "Why is this relative to what we're talking about?" I'll bring it back, which is that if it's the first time you're going through it, you can't recognize the signs because you don't have anything to compare it to. And so hopefully, listening to this podcast and listening to other people, not just, you know, not me and Chris, but like other people who are even, even more successful, whatever, they can at least tell you what it tastes like. They can tell you what the room looks like. They can tell you what the temperature feels like. They can tell you what it feels like in their bodies. So that when you are going through it, you can say, "Okay, I haven't been here before, but this sounds like Albuquerque. This sounds like a missing finance." And that's why having, like, and if you're in the early on stages and, and you're going through the, like, you're going, you're consuming the free content, it's less stuff. It's like, use this because the most valuable thing you can get is the context of what the experience feels like when you're going through it. So someone can describe to you their experience so that you can relate it to your present and be like, "Okay, I'm on the right path." Yeah. It's the feeling of loneliness and uncertainty. Hang on, what if this, what if this is a sign that I'm not supposed to be here? What if this is a sign that I'm doing it wrong? Right? And relinquishing that. The, if there was a big meta indicator that you're doing the right thing, doing what everyone isn't doing is already probably the biggest, the single biggest indicator that you're doing the right thing. Like, it's, it's the, if, if I could wish nothing else on my child, whenever I choose to have them in the future, is that they have high agency, which is that they are, they make decisions independent from the opinions of other people. And when we hear words like authentic and original and things like that, it's because the person starts at square one and says, "Well, what do I want?" And then they start building from there.

I had a conversation with one of my, one of my teammates, um, who runs our, my LinkedIn. And he said, "You know, Alex, it's easy for you. It's always, always a really great start. Great way to trigger. Really. Please tell me more. Why do you go on?" He said, "It's, it's easy for you, Alex, to create this personal brand. He's like, you have so many interesting things about you. He's like, you dress a certain way, you act a certain way. And he said, it's different than everyone else does, right?" And I said, "I don't think that's true. I think that everyone has a personal brand that is unique and different. But everyone doesn't look that way because they conform to whatever, what they think everyone else wants them to look like. And so the fact that they are boring and they resent the fact that they're boring is because they are living out reflections of what, what they think everyone else wants them to do. And so all you have to do is start at square zero and be like, 'What do I want?'" Because I realized after I got out of Gym Launch, that I mean, I dressed a certain way for too much because I was the head of an entire community of gyms. And it made sense for me to dress that way because I needed to, I needed to look that part, right? But when I was at ground zero and I was like, "Okay, what do I want?" And I thought about it for a long time. And I was like, "Well, what would 85-year-old me wear?" I was like, "85-year-old me would wear probably the most functional thing he could wear because he doesn't care what his shoes look like, he doesn't care what his shirt looks like, he just wants to be comfortable." And so I just started trying all the things that I could possibly imagine for shoes, shorts, hats, whatever, to find the thing that I was like, "You know what? This is the most comfortable. And this allows me to do the most things in the most rooms without changing." And so people then are like, "Man, that's so unique." But it was actually just saying, "If I were to, or if everyone was gone from existence, what would I do? What would my work be? Right? How would I dress? Who would I date?" That's a real one. Who would I date if no one else told me what they thought about it? Maybe someone different than you're dating right now. And if the person that you would want to date isn't the person you're dating right now, and the person that you'd want to date would never date you, then maybe rather than dating these mediocre Mollies or mediocre Mats, you take the period of time, you go on the untrodden path. You have people reject you and say, "Oh, you're not coming out tonight? You're going to the gym again? Right? Oh, I can't eat with us. Right? She's on it. She's on a diet again. How long is she gonna stick with this one?" Right? Because the thing is, is that the stick to it, the muscle itself, is something that you work on. Because if you start a diet and you failed, and you started working out and you failed, if you just make it longer every time before you fail, you're still making progress. And you're still doing something that everyone else isn't doing. Yeah. And that is the biggest meta indicator that you possibly can. Is if, because everyone sucks, like so many people are mediocre, like half of the United States is in debt, they don't even have a dot, like they're their negative net worth. And so like, just saying different than that, like the bar isn't high. We talked about this, dude. Go for it. I know, I know. Just go for it. The bar has never been set lower to separate yourself out from the pack. Never been set lower.

And this is for, you know, the black pill internet, by the way. It is supposed to be one step beyond the red pill to see that life and dating, largely for men, is, uh, there's an uncomfortable reality that if you aren't blessed with the right physical attractiveness, status, or money, LSM looks, LMS, luck, money, status, if you don't have the right prerequisites, you're basically doomed. You're a genetic dead end. And eat. Um, is that a bad thing? Up, according to them? I, so, okay, I'm gonna zoom out real quick. And then I, I know, I know we're gonna go on this. Yeah, yeah. So if we're looking at a species, right? Let's look at deer, right? A lot of people have deer in their backyard, well, what is natural is that one buck inseminates 50 doe, and he competes with all the other deer. And the reason for that is because then it actually allows the quote best genes to proliferate. Now, best is determined by what actually continues, continues on, right? Perilously close to eugenics here, Alex. Well, I'm just talking about, I'm just talking about deer. I'm just talking about deer. If anyone, I'm just talking about deer. I'm not saying this is what it should be. But the, the point that, that I wanted to make was not, I think where everyone thinks I'm going with this, which is that a lot of the, you know, the black, whatever you just said, right, black pill, um, I would imagine are casting an expectation on the universe that it shouldn't be this way. Why not? And this is exactly like the hater who says, "You're not going to amount to anything." And the reason that it hurts is because you're like, "What if they're right?" And then, like, staring at the mirror with that question of like, "What if they're right? What if I am out of shape?" Because the thing is, is that, like, in order to be the top quote one percent, or even the top ten percent, shoot up, or even just above average, right? You just need to not be overweight, dude. You need to not be overweight, right? You need to be gainfully employed. The bar is so low. The bar is so unbelievably low.

I got this idea. I got it. I gotta teach you about, uh, the alpha history fantasy, right? Modern men who are angry at a world they feel has rejected them mistakenly believe that they would have somehow done better in medieval times. They are adamant that the chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon fodder peasant number one million three hundred and seventy-three thousand whose favela was sacked and destroyed. And it's this wistfulness for the past. And dude, I get it. Like, if you feel lost and alone and like nobody understands you and like you've been forgotten, and things shouldn't be this way, guess what? They've always been this way. And right now, the bar has never been set lower. If you have the opportunity to sit down and listen to me and Alex waffle on for three and a half hours, you have the capacity, the conscientiousness, the wherewithal to be able to go out tomorrow and take one thing that you've hit from today.

This is something I wanted to get onto, which which I think is important, which is, oh, sorry, avoiding the mental masturbation. You know, we can do this thing and like, speed quotes into the ether and like, a, like an Uzi, right? Just unloading all of these different things. And I think that a lot of people feel, uh, a general overwhelm of indexing of information. And, oh my God, I'm learning all of this stuff and I don't feel like I'm making any progress. And I really wanted to try and cut through this at some point in the conversation today as well. Which is Tim Ferriss has an idea called the good sticks. Okay. When I first started out on this journey of personal growth, felt guilty because I didn't have a perfectly curated Evernote external brain with nested folders and all of my book summaries. And I was supposed to keep all of this thing, and how am I going to remember it? And blah, blah, blah. Five and a bit years later, people come up to me and ask, one of the most common questions to get asked is, "How the do you remember all of the things that you remember?" Two things. First off, I don't remember anything that I don't care about. And the second thing, massive amounts of exposure. Those are the only two things that are going on. I've done 670 podcasts in five years, for hours, and all of the reading I had to do beforehand, and all of the listening I had to do beforehand as well. And I didn't stress myself about what I had to remember. So if you listen to this three and a bit hour podcast and you go, "They talked, they said a lot of words there. Alex said a lot of words. Chris in a lot of words." What's the one thing that you couldn't stop thinking about? And then maybe nothing except like, we failed. If there's one thing that you can't stop thinking about, that story about the kid from Cumbria, that time when Alex had to drive across the country, that's the thing. That is the thing. And allowing yourself to naturally select whatever the most important learning is from the content that you consume is the best way to work out what, what is going to resonate. And it's the best way to act on it as well. If you can't stop thinking about it when you go to bed tonight, and you can't stop telling your friends about it in the morning, and you've clipped it from this podcast, or any other podcast, or any other book, or whatever, whatever the thing is that you keep sending photos of and you keep on reciting to people, and you try and tell your mum about, and she doesn't get it. That is the thing that you need to work on. And you don't need to do. If you take half a thing from this podcast, or any other podcast, that and you work on it for a month, you have made so much progress. And do you understand how blessed you are to have this opportunity? You could have been born in the Middle Ages before the Gutenberg printing press, when they wouldn't even give you the Bible in the common language, so that you had to go through the priest to be able to have a relationship with God. Right now, you can search for whatever it is that you're dealing with, find the greatest minds on the planet, listen to them, and then the next day, implement it. And you move not only yourself, but you move the world around you. You get to nudge yourself and the rest of the world in a direction that you want to go. And you get to feel proud about it. And it's within your control. You have never been more blessed.

There's a, there's a quote that I wanna, I wanna hit here that I think would be relevant to we were just talking about with the people who are sad and alone. And one of the, one of the biggest breakthroughs that I had from a, from a mental perspective was actually defining emotions for what they are operationally. So sadness comes from a lack of options, or rather, a lack of perceived options. And that's why it feels like hopelessness because you don't know what to do. But when I realized that sadness meant that I didn't know what to do, it meant that another way that I could define sadness was ignorance. And that is solvable. And so whenever I feel sad now, it's been my trigger to immediately think, "What do I not know? What option do I not see?" Because the opposite of that is anxiety, which is you have many options and you have few priorities. Looks, you have many paths that you could presume, you just don't know which one. And so being able to operationalize what these emotions felt like. So if you feel sad, it just means that you need to go learn more. And that you can do. And then all of a sudden, the learning more becomes the option. And they don't need to feel sad anymore. And that was like one of the biggest breakthroughs from my, like, mental health or whatever you want to call it, mindset that set me free. And I've taken a lot of effort to try and operationalize emotions so that I can either get out of them or lean into them. So like patience, for example, right? I'm only bringing this up because I think it might be relevant to some people. Is that most goals are attainable if you expand the time horizon. Even enormous ones. Like, you can do anything. Intense. You could walk to the moon. You could do. There you go. You can do anything. And so for me, I am, I would say a naturally impatient person. Like, I tend to want things immediately now. And, you know, what you probably are too. But once I defined patience as figuring out what to do in the meantime, it allowed me to control what I did. Because now, like, you and I are being patient for your stock investments right now, as we're on this podcast. We're being patient for that because we're doing things in the meantime. And so whenever I felt impatient and wanted to change course, I had to just redefine, "What do I need to do today?" And if you are sad and impatient, then it means that right now, you need to learn what the option is that you need to go pursue. And then that makes it very much under your control. And so

Step by step, each of these emotions over time, I spent a lot of time trying to define them out so that they no longer control me. And I know how to solve them. And then, and then now, it just becomes a faster and faster muscle. "Oh, I feel anxiety." That means that I have many options that I don't have priorities. Okay, what's my priority? And then all of a sudden, what used to take days of anxiety and feeling this, you know, frog in my throat, was just, "Oh, I need to make a list of all the things that I'm looking at. Which one's the most important? Ignore the rest." And then I'm good.

And what you say, "Days takes minutes." "One of yours is choosing the plan isn't hard. Doing the plan isn't hard. Sticking to the plan is hard." Charlie Munger said, "The money isn't made in the buy, and it's not made in the sell. It's made in the weight." And that, like, I just feel like that's such an elegant way of thinking about it. It's like the hard part about the plan is sticking to the plan. Like the plan wasn't bad. Your first plan was good because it's easy to go say, "I'm gonna work out three days a week for the next year." And it's a good plan. A good plan. It's a pretty good plan.

And the interesting thing is that, like, a mediocre plan that's stuck to always outperforms an amazing and perfect plan that you never stick with to begin with. And I know this obviously from the fitness world, but it applies to everything. And so, like, the "stick to it" muscle is the one that you have to flex. And that's why, like, if you're going through things, you have, especially in the earlier days, like, I remember I used to start and stop and start and stop. And I try this thing, I try that thing. It's normal because you haven't, you haven't been reinforced enough of sticking with something, right?

But the thing is, it's like you have to stick it out long enough that you get that first carrot, you get that first cookie. And then all of a sudden, everything that you did to get there, you're like, "Oh, more of that will get me more cookies." And that's, and then, and then it just becomes the self-perpetuating cycle. Then you get addicted to working. And then you do a launch to 500,000 people and you lock yourself in a closet six hours a day for two years.

Yeah, that's exactly that. Because I've been rewarded in the past. Because the first time I actually spent a lot of time on a presentation and I felt good when I walked on stage and didn't feel anxiety, I was like, "Oh, I want this every time." Yeah. And then I had this, the second thought, which is the much scarier thought, which is, "Now I have to do this every time. This is the new bar. This is the new bar."

I want to round out something on that sort of black pill side, which is if you listen to this and you think, "Must be nice," or "Easy for you to say," I get it. Like, I, I get it. And if you feel like there is something that you can't get over, some genetic, societal, cultural defect that means that you do not have the same ceiling that you think that you should, or that other people appear to have, I get it. And the question I would ask is, "What do you want?" Like, do you want sympathy? Because I will happily give you sympathy. I know what it feels like to be someone that has no belief in themselves, and that believes that you are fundamentally a loser, and that nothing is going to come to you, and that you deserve for nothing to come to you. I understand what that feels like. But what does that mindset get you? Like, fundamentally, what does that mindset give you?

Okay, so let's say, let's say that you have been dealt as difficult of a hand as possible. And, yeah, and to quote you, to you, I can promise you that there is someone who has had it worse and has done it better. I put this clip out a while ago, this, like, just random talking about a morning routine thing, and it was pretty basic, but it went interstellar. And the real internet got a hold of it, you know, like, not your fans, but like the real internet, like, it, we've got the general public. And I got a hold of it. The most common comment was something along the lines of, "Tell me you don't have kids without telling me that you don't have kids." Right? Which is, "Must be easy for you to say. I have a daughter." To get up in the morning. I'm like, "Okay, tell me what that mindset gets you." Genuinely, tell me what that mindset gets you. It says, "I'm in a situation which I cannot get over, and there are things in reality imposed on me which stop me from doing something." There is somebody out there who has three times as many kids as you, and they still do it. So what is it that they've got? Like, what is it that they're doing? Have they got an unfair advantage? What is it? Tell me.

It's also, if you take down, if you walk down the natural logic of that statement, who do you blame? If you're saying, "Must be nice," or "Tell me, tell me that you don't have kids without telling me that you don't have kids," then does that mean that you blame your child for all the things that you don't have in life? It's a tough, tough weight to put on a kid. Because, I mean, I would hope that they don't see that comment, because then they'd be like, "Wait, Mom, Dad, like, you didn't live out your dreams because I exist." Tough.

Another one here, a sequence actually that I love: "You don't have to feel good about it. You just have to keep going. The feeling will pass, but you will remain. You are greater than your feelings." "Going to bed late and waking up early to work for a few days won't kill you. You're not going to burn out. You're doing what it takes." "If you're one of those people that push work-life balance, just remember the people who like working a lot don't care." "I've never regretted trying harder at anything ever. Hard times last long, but an epic story feels like a lifetime." Nailed it.

Yeah, I just think when I look at you in particular, and I realize this during our second conversation at the start of this year, the reason that people get confused about your motivation and your workload is that they don't realize that the thing you do for work is the thing that you do for fun. That's a fundamental misunderstanding that people have. And because of that, you're prepared to work hard. And working hard doesn't feel like wasted time. Lots of people associate working hard with not making progress. Therefore, working feels like wasting.

So the idea that working hard doesn't make progress is one of the biggest forces that exists in humanity. Because at the end of the day, whatever you amount to isn't going to matter anyways, right? And so if there is anything that's eternal for us, at least as individuals, it's going to be who we become in the process. And so one of my favorite quotes is, "The work works on you more than you work on it." And so if you want to be the best in the world at something, you do the work to become the best in the world, and the work works on you.

And so, I mean, there's a, there's a Biblical proverb, I think it's just like, um, "There is, there is profit in all labor." And that means that even if the thing that you're working on right now doesn't amount to the outcome that you expected that it would, it doesn't mean that you don't become better through doing it. And so I'll give you a very real example. So I spent five years building a chain of gyms. So I had six locations, and after that, I sold five of them, I shut one down, and then I transitioned to doing turnarounds. In the transition between shutting my gyms down, I got a big payday because I sold my five gyms. Big for me, relative. I took all that money and I put it into the next thing. The partner that I had in that next thing ended up taking the money and disappearing, filing bankruptcy, and sending it to his girlfriend in Sweden. I couldn't make this up. So there's no way I could get the money back, and he had filed bankruptcy. There's no, there's no course of action for a lawsuit.

And so a lot of people would probably go through that mental situation and think, and I went through this, was thinking, "I just wasted the last five years." Like, I literally started a chain, built, like, put everything into the second location, put everything into the third location, the fourth location, it kept going, right? I kept doubling down. And then I get my big payday, and I put it all, all on black, and then it disappears with one spin of the roulette. And so here I am, and I'm like, "I have nothing to show for the last five years of work." But then in the next 12 months, I made more money than I had ever made in my entire life up to that point. The five years I made, I made the, I made more profit the next 12 months than, I mean, the last five years times, like, five. And it was because, and this is only, I was only able to really realize this in retrospect, which is why I'm sharing it, which is that the thing that was the outcome of those five years was me, and the skills and the experiences that I possessed through going through it.

And so whatever the next mountain that you're trying to climb is, of course, it's going to be higher. But it's going to require you to go through the smaller mountains to get to that point. So because the more able you are, the more able you realize you can become, and you will get way bigger outcomes from the things that you have, like the path that led you here, then, then you, then you think you can. And so that's why since that moment when I lost everything and then I was able to make more in the next 12 months, I realized that no work is wasted because I am the output of the work, not the outcome. And that was one of the biggest frame shifts for me in never thinking that work is wasted. Because the more I work, the bigger my work ethic, the more my work capacity increases.

And to give an exercise example, because I think it's, it's cool and interesting, is that a lot of people talk about this concept of overtraining. Don't worry, I'll bring it back. All right. They talk about this concept of overtraining. I remember I was talking, I had this, a woman that Layla and I are friends with, very successful business owner, had a boy toy with her. And he was like, "Aren't you concerned about overtraining?" And I was feeling a little pissy that day. And I said, "Bro, once you start looking like you work out, you can worry about overtraining. I was like, until that point, you don't need to worry about overtraining." I was being a little bit mean, but I think he, he did remember it. He did change the way he trained and he did gain muscle afterwards. So I felt okay about it.

Now, the point of that little quip, right, was that what I explained to him is that your ability to recover from working out itself is trainable. So when you do more volume, your ability to withstand volume, your work capacity increases. And so to the same degree, people are like, "I feel burnt out." The thing is, is that you either die or you adapt. That's it, right? And in the fitness world, you either die, get injured, or adapt, right? And since you're probably not going to die, you really just need to make sure that you don't get injured. And if you don't get injured and you don't die, you get better. And so that mental process in terms of how I see work has been like the most self-fulfilling prophecy that I've had. Because the more I work, the better I get at working, the more productive I am per unit of time. And so, and then I get the outcomes that happen eventually. But the point is, and you've probably, I mean, I already know you know this, but the outcomes become so irrelevant compared to the reward that you get in the meantime. Because the people who are experts, and this is from my, my good friend Dr. Kashi, people who are experts at any skill become experts because they learn how to become rewarded from the work itself. And so, like, they don't actually have something that you don't. It's just that they measure success differently.

"Judge Yourself by Your Actions, Not by Your Thoughts." I became significantly less disappointed in myself when I started judging myself only on the actions I took, not the thoughts I had. Patience is a virtue that I feel like I haven't had. And it's been something that I've spoken over myself for many years. I was like, "I'm an impatient person. I want things fast, etc." When I realized that I should use the same lens that I judge other people on when I judge myself, which is, someone might say, "I'm a really honest guy." But if I have no evidence that you're an honest person, or when I put you in a situation where you could be honest and you're not, I would say, "No, you're not." Now, that person probably thinks of themselves as honest. Or to the same degree, "I'm a really loyal guy." But as soon as I put a $10 in front of you, and you've got your, your girl at home, you jump. You're not that loyal. You just haven't had the opportunity to show that you're loyal.

And so for me, my thoughts about what I thought I was were actually really negative. But when I try to think, "Okay, well, I can be patient if I act patient, even if I don't feel patient." And then that allowed me to start giving myself a stack of undeniable proof that I am who I wanted to be. And I don't believe in binary traits, meaning like, he's patient or he's impatient, or he's loyal or he's disloyal. It's the question is, how loyal are you? How honest are you? How patient are you? And by switching the character traits that I wanted to have into progressions or continuums, allowed me to make progress on them simply by giving myself more proof, or one more penny on the scale that says, "I'm a little bit more patient than I was." "I'm a little bit more patient." "I'm a little bit more patient." To the point where I have so many pennies on the scale that I can say, "I think I am pretty patient." Even though every time I put a penny on the scale, I don't want to put a penny on the scale. I want to get the thing to happen today. I want it to happen yesterday. Because why is it taking so long? It didn't take that long for this person. That feels like I work harder than them, and I feel like I'm better than them. Why am I not doing that? But I put the penny on the scale.

Well, ultimately, what is patience? Is patience feeling patient, or is patient doing the thing that is patience? So Sam Harris, in his first conversation with Joe Rogan, about 10 years ago, they talk about how courage is an unfakable emotion. And it's such a good frame. You're gonna love this. So he said, "If you do the thing in spite of being fearful of doing the thing, that is courage. And if you don't do the thing, even though you felt like doing the thing, that is cowardice." And I think that motivation and patience are exactly the same. If you're patient despite not feeling patient, that is patience. Yes, that is how it works. And that was that realization that you just said was the reason for that quote, because it was me realizing that I can actually have these traits even if I don't feel like I live those traits. And so that's why, probably, at least for me, when people are like, "Whatever the trait is, like, he's so humble, he's so whatever," like, you probably will never feel like you have the trait, but you can still have the trait based on evidence rather than emotion. And I think that frame of evidence has been, I mean, if I had a North Star of personal development for myself, it's been just give myself proof.

And I mean, in so many ways, like the reason that I didn't, I mean, I'm going to go on a tangent, but again, I'll bring it back. I didn't talk about how to run gyms until I had six gyms, because I didn't feel like I was qualified enough to talk about it. And I only started talking about gyms when so many people were like, "Dude, how do you run your gyms? How do you run your gyms?" And if I rewind even before that, I didn't feel qualified to talk about fitness, but I had a six-pack for a decade. You know what I mean? And I had multiple state, state records, but I still didn't feel qualified to talk about fitness until everyone was like, "Dude, how do you, how you do this? How do you strength train? How do you, how do you eat this way?" Whatever it is, right? And so if you, if you can give yourself evidence, the world around you, like fame, like your evidence will change how people treat you, independent of how you feel about it.

Well, this is why the "must be easy," "must be nice" is so flawed. Because what you're saying is, I see the outcomes, and I have no idea of the difficulty of the inputs. I have absolutely no idea what barriers you need to get over. You could be, you could find it 99 out of 100 difficult to be patient, and yet you are, "Must be nice for you, you've got that patience gene." Go eat, eat. You have no idea how hard it is for people to do the things that they do. And the people that make it look easy, in some regards, contribute to this problem. Like, I, and this is why I really love, a massive fan of a lot of your work, and I think that one of the reasons is that it's so honest and and self-effacing about the challenges and about the steps that you have to get through. And because the journey is relatively well narratized, and you can, you can track it step by step, and you've created a kind of a cohesive timeline of how all of this stuff worked, there is a point along specifically your journey, but hopefully mine and other people's too, where people can inject themselves and say, "Oh, I'm at that bit. I'm the 15-year-old that I'm at that bit. I resent my parents. I've just lost all my money. I I feel like I need to..." Like, you have every different problem that you can encounter in life is present in Alex's timeline. And I think that that's really important.

I think this, this is one of the, I would say this is a criticism that I have about some of the personal development, self-growth, and a lot of the business advice as well. Even the bad times are romanticized, and they're not romantic. Like, it feels like hell. It feels like to do the thing, to fail, to not feel like anybody cares about you, to not even know that there's going to be glory in retrospect. Yeah, it feels despondent and destitute and sad and alone. And I get it. And I think that the more visceral that we can make these stories, the better it is. Because I know that that's what would have resonated with me, because I would have gone, "That's an undeniable stack of proof that you were where you said you were."

I'll tell you one that maybe will resonate with somebody in the audience. So I remember when I decided to move. So I moved to California to start a gym or get into fitness. And I got there, and the guy who I said I was going to mentor under was like, "Where are you staying?" And I was like, "I don't know. I just got here." And he's like, "What do you mean you don't know?" I was like, "I don't know. I just, I just showed up." And so he went, he said, "I could sleep at his place that night." The next morning, went to the gym, and he got on chair and said, "Hey, who here is going to house this kid?" And one guy came up to me was like, "I'll give you a room." So I rented one room in a house for $400 a month. And then when I left that room to start sleeping at the gym, which was an hour away, because I couldn't make the commute, so I saved $400 a month. I remember being actually kind of excited about it. I remember being like, "Man, this is an essential story. Yeah, this is this is my Rocky cut scene."

The thing is, the Rocky cut scene lasts 30 seconds in the movie, but it can last five years in your life. And when I was sleeping on the gym floor, I'll give you a detail that that'll tell you that the stack of an entire, um, was that I, my first gym was underneath of a parking garage. And so there's these metal dividers in the ceiling, and so cars would drive over this, and it's a concrete box. And so it sounded like a gunshot, like, and it would happen at all hours of the night. And probably the most painful from an emotional perspective experience that I would have on a regular basis was that it was also abandoned enough parking lot that college kids, kids my age, would go up and party on the roof. And so like, while they were partying literally above my head and making noise that would prevent me from sleeping, I would be down below in an in a dark warehouse in a city that I knew no one. Like, I was from Baltimore. I drove across the country. I went to Huntington Beach. I literally knew no one, and no one knew me. And so I'm sleeping there, and then I realize that I can't really sleep at night. And so I'm, I'm taking, basically, I'm living on naps for the first six months of the gym. And like, homeless people are sleeping in my parking lot, and I have to like go out and tell them to like, go away. And then I get back, lock the door, and I go back on the AstroTurf, which is where I slept with a blanket and a pillow. And I bring this up because like the visceral feeling that you go through when you're going through the mound of period, or the eating what feels like a marathon, is that it's, it becomes a 30-second sound bite in my story. Yeah, but it was years.

And so like, even at the same group of, "Man, you're such a natural salesman." The first job I ever got offered out of college was a sales job, and I said, "I'm not a salesman. I'm an academic." Oh. And then as soon as I opened my gym, I was like, "Oh, how do I pay rent?" And someone walked in the door, and I was like, "Please give me money. Uh, I promise." And I, I had no equipment in my gym because I couldn't afford any. So it's an empty gym with just turf. And I was like, "I promise you, I will get you amazing results." And they're like, "Are you gonna be here tomorrow?" And I was like, "I sleep here. I have to be here. I promise I'll be here. It's impossible for me to not be here. I can't live. I can't leave." Right? And so the early people took pity on me. When they literally paid the, for the first 29 members I signed up in the first two weeks before the gym opened, was from pity. It wasn't from charisma. It was pure pity. I'll be real with you. And it was the exact amount that I needed to pay rent. And I remember the first month of rent that I paid with, this is actually wild. I only, I only looked at this in retrospect. I made exactly $4,972 in my first month of my gym. My rent was $4,972. And I remember working like a dog to get that. I'd never made money in my life. Like, I never, like, really asked anyone for money. And all of a sudden, I had to come up with $5,000 in a month. And then at the end of the month, I watched it go to zero. And then I was like, "I have to do it again."

And that was when, like, the reality of the situation of, like, there was no escape. There was no one who was going to come to save me. And there was, I couldn't blame my dad. I couldn't blame my mom. I was the one who had chosen this life. But the alternative was that I had to go back to my father of failure and have him look and look me in the eyes and say, "I told you. And come here, come here. Don't worry about it. You know, I told you this, this gym stuff, this fitness stuff, this starting room, it's, it's for later. It's fine. Just go about, hey, you've got this. You've got this great degree. You've got, just go to the, go to the business school to do the thing." And I knew exactly what happened, but would have happened after that is that for the rest of my life, he would have had absolute authority over everything that I did. And that felt like death. And so that was what I ran away from.

When I was in that moment, like, whenever I felt like my back was against the wall and I didn't know what to do, and it felt like the Instagram reels of like the motivation weren't going to get me through what I was going through, because no one cared that I was sleeping alone. I let them know I'm sleeping on the floor. And a month later, when you're still sleeping on the floor and everyone's like, "Don't care." Like, "Great, you're pursuing your dream." Right, right. Early days. But despite that, the "must be easy" mantra is the easiest indicator that you have a victim mindset. Because what it means is, "I can't achieve this thing because on some level," you say, "Must be easy." There's some level of desire that's there. You're like, "I'd like to achieve some aspect of this." And then rather than feel the pain of saying that I'm inadequate or I'm not taking action, we cast our our inadequacy on some outside object or some outside circumstance. And by doing that, we remove all agency and all power that we have over our lives. And for me, I would rather be somebody who has absolute power and have nothing to show for it than somebody who has all the all the the things to show for it, but know that I'm life's life being one protracted training montage is a really important lesson to learn. The fact that in the Rocky movie, it is 90 seconds, and then everything is fixed. And that can last for decades. That can last for years. And I think that the lack of glory, the lack of certainty, yeah, it makes it, it turns it from worthwhile majesty into, it's, it's not even sufficiently triumphant to be called sad. Like, it's just like weak and pissy. And you have no idea if anything's gonna work. But what's the alternative? Entropy is going to come and get you. So what's the alternative? Like my Twitter bio says, "Locally reversing entropy." And I, I think that that really is what you should try and do, because it's going to come for you. The lack of certainty is what actually makes it worth it.

And so here's my point. Let's think, let's consider the alternative, which is that you are on the path, and you are guaranteed to know that you're going to get the outcome. All of the mystery is gone. There is no excitement. Which is why they said, you know, in the ancient Romans, or sorry, the ancient Greeks would say that the gods always envied the mortals because their life was so ephemeral, they had so much chance that could happen to them, right? Where the gods always knew that they weren't going to die. And it was completely guaranteed. And so what we do is we basically have this wish that if it actually came true, we would hate it even more than our current circumstance. If you knew that you were going to succeed, it wouldn't be worth doing to begin with. The fact that you are uncertain when you start is what makes it worthwhile. And the fallacy of being in the pursuit is the worry or the concern that it won't amount to anything, because who you are becoming is the thing that you are amounting to in real time, every day.

This was something that Mark Manson tweeted. He put it in his newsletter, actually, and it made me think of a lesson that I learned a long time ago: "Stop complaining about the results you didn't get from the work you didn't put in." The only way to become more successful than most people is to be willing to do something most people aren't willing to do. And this is that lean-in mentality again. Take a look. It sucks. It's shitty. You're tired. Everybody says that you're leaving your friends behind, leaving your family behind, betraying your culture, betraying whatever expectation it is that they have on you. You need to do something that most people aren't willing to do. Because as we've said, the average American is obese, in debt, and divorced. Like, is that really, oh, brilliant, fantastic. I'm in the center of the bell curve distribution here. That's really congratulations. And then the other side: "Stop complaining about the results you didn't get from the work you didn't put in." Okay, so you didn't lose weight this month. Did you follow your diet? Well, I did for half the month. Okay, so is it any surprise that you didn't lose any weight? How's your content creation game going? Well, I, I, you know, I spent a lot of time planning for the podcast that I'm going to release, for the Instagram that I'm going to start, or from the Substack that I'm going to begin writing on. Okay, and what did you actually do? It comes back to like, the work doesn't care.

Charlie Munger, in one of his seminal speeches, talks about how to guarantee failure. How to make sure that you are a failure. And he inverts the, the concept of success. It's like, what could you do to make sure that you were a failure? It's like, well, you would definitely get involved in drugs, drinking. He says, "Was it leveraged liquor and women?" That's, you know, Charlie's, Charlie's big one. But one of the ones that he has, I think he has seven in his, in his, in his speech, is consistency. He's like, "You have to make sure that you're inconsistent." He's like, "Because if you are consistent, and you have none of the other attributes, he's like, it's, you still might be successful. He's like, it's, it's very tough for people who are consistent to not be successful." And he makes an especially pointed point about consistency because, in my opinion, it's one of the most difficult of the virtues for humans to do because we're so attracted to novelty. And so, like, I mean, I used to deal with this with, you know, people on their diets all the time. I remember I ran gyms. And so someone would come in, and I would always ask a question, "So, have you been following the meal plan?" And then they would say, "Yes." And so then I started changing the way I asked the question. So I'd say, "Out of the 21 meals that you were supposed to eat, how many of the 21 did you have exactly the way it was on the meal plan?" And then they would be like, "Oh, I mean, at least half." And they would say it as though that was a mark of success.

And right now, the meal plan could be your content plan. It could be your, it could be your showing up to work on time plan. It could be the time that you want to put towards your side hustle. Doesn't really matter. But if there's one muscle that you can flex, it's learning to do the same thing over and over again. Like, one of the, one of the values that we had at Gym Launch is, "Do the boring work." Because boring is what makes you rich. Right? It's, it's, it's, it's writing the follow-up sequence to your, to the purchase page that you don't feel like doing, but you know you should do. It's running the split test for the 10th time. It's, it's actually going through and prepping for 20 minutes before you have the meeting, because it's amazing how much smarter you can appear with 20 minutes of preparation. Like, you can appear 50 IQ points smarter if you just prepare for meetings for 20 minutes.

I remember I did a consulting day, which I've only done three in my entire life. And when I showed up, uh, to the day, because I always want to make sure that everyone always gets more for me than I, than they give me, um, I had taken, I don't know, four hours. Not a long time, but a long time for, I think some people. But for me, four hours is nothing. I count in hundreds. So this was irrelevant. And so I took four hours and actually took the time and put it in to do research on the individual. So I looked at every single page they had, every landing page, every offer, every, everything. And I had seven pages of things that I thought would make them more money. And so when I started, I was like, "This is what we're going to go through today, and I'll walk you through line by line, and you'll have this as a take-behind so you can execute it with your team." It's a bigger company. And the guy was shocked. He was like, "Never in my entire life has anyone had this preparation." And that's what goes back to like, you need 20 podcasts to be in the top one percent. The, the bar for excellence.

Like I have this timer that I have on my desk, which, it's the easiest purchase you can make. I think it was like seven bucks on Amazon. It's a little twist kitchen timer. It's very easy. And it's been probably my biggest focus hack, you know, to date, which is I turn it when I want to start working. And part of it allows me to think how long I get better at predicting how long it's gonna take me to do something. So I think, I think this will take me 35 minutes. So I turn the clock to 35, and I click on, and I start working on the thing. And the moment my phone rings, or I look at Slack, or whatever, I stop the timer. And so you actually see that your time on task is usually significantly less than you think it is. And I think that in my early days, I would spend a very long time in front of a computer, telling myself that I was working, with very few minutes actually on task. And that's why I think that most things are actually significantly easier than people think they are. They just don't know how to try hard. Because the harder that you try, the easier it gets. And so it's like, if you can just learn to love what trying hard feels like, then all of a sudden, it becomes unreasonable that you can't win.

So, like, for the presentation that I'm giving, I explained a little bit earlier about what my process looks like. If you were to say, "What would it take for somebody to be unreasonably good?" That it would be impossible for them to not be a top one percent salesman or a top one percent content creator. And he said, "What would that person need to do?" Irrelevant from outcome. What would be the actions or evidence that they would have to do prior to that thing that would make it unreasonable that they couldn't succeed?" And then you do those things. What happens is you realize that it's actually not that hard because you put so much work into it, and the bar from other people working is so embarrassingly low that they then ask you how you did it. "Must be easy."

Consistency doesn't guarantee that you'll be successful, but not being consistent will guarantee that you won't reach success. You have a productivity hack, an easy productivity hack. Instead of spending time getting in the mood to work, just start working. Confront the work. People think they need perfect conditions to start. When in reality, starting is the perfect condition. I'm married to that. I love that. Because if you think, like, I, you know, I obviously am somebody who always wants to optimize how much work I do per unit of time. And so I, I was, you know, there was definitely times earlier in my life I was really romanticized by these, like, very extensive morning routines and supplement rituals and like all this stuff of mental masturbation around the work that needed to be done. But when I looked at two hours later and nothing had actually gotten done, the moment you begin working is when your output per unit of time goes up. And so that makes beginning the single greatest hack that you can have for everything else that you do and work. Because things, when you start working, you start getting in the mood to work, right? Like everything else is procrastinating around the work that you think you should do. But like, I have noticed for me, at least, I have these, I have some big mental tasks, you know what I mean? Like, big content piece or big thing that you need, like, you know, it's going to take real mental effort. It takes me like five minutes of actually being in it to then get a little bit of a lay of the land to then get into it. But I used to take hours to delay to start the first five minutes. And so my time compression of when I thought I should start doing something and when I started doing it, over time, it's just compressed to the point where it's like, the moment I think that I need to start doing it, sometimes I just start it. Because then what happens? I get this open loop. And rather than complete work at like, because a lot of people were like, "I want to complete it at this really nice clean point." Stop halfway through the sentence because it'll drive you mad. That's the Zygonic effect in full work.

Do you know this story? Zygonic? Oh, wow. This is, it's way more than I do. That's why you shut up. That's what you're leveraging here. So, um, the Zygonic effect was a study originally done on servers in restaurants, okay? And they realized, you've ever been at a restaurant and a server comes up and stands with their hands behind their back and goes, "What would you like tonight, sir?" And you say, "I'll have the lobster roll and a glass of red wine and a blah blah." And you're like, "This motherfucker's not, he hasn't got a pen or a pad of paper. He's crazy." And then they go off. And what they realized was servers in restaurants were unbelievably good at being able to recall exactly what a table's order was while that table's order was still open. So, guys in table 16, they want to swap the peas out for a little bit of extra rice. And they're doing this thing. As soon as the table was closed, they couldn't remember anything. So this is an open loop, closed loop system. And it's built into the brain. The brain abhors an open loop. It's the same reason why Netflix cliffhangers at the end of every episode guarantee that you'll watch the next one, because you can't bear the fact. There are even novels in the dark romance genre that make guarantees that there won't be cliffhangers. They make, they put it on the front or the back of the book and they say, "No cliffhanger is guaranteed," which is people have so much distaste for it that it's a selling point that you get the closure at the end of it. And finishing halfway through a sentence reduces the activation energy required to begin that sentence the next day. And it keeps it in your mind too, overnight. So I think, yeah, whether you've stumbled on it or whether you knew about it, you've managed to leverage a pretty powerful piece of psychology. Though sick.

Going back to the work thing, uh, another one from you that I absolutely adore: "It just takes work. Shitloads and shitloads of work. Every time I try and dress it up or cut a corner, I get brutally reminded the work just needs doing. The work doesn't care who you are. It just cares that it gets done." I'm actually going to reverse quote David Goggins on this one, but, uh, I love this quote that he has, which he says, "There are no shortcuts for you, David." Or, "There are no shortcuts for you, Goggins." I heard him say that, and I just love that as a refrain, which is that a lot of people look for a shortcut, but the idea that you say, like, "They're not for you. You don't get to use them. You are immune to shortcuts." I just love it because then it just further shortcuts the path to the work that needs to get done. And I wrote that tweet on my, I don't know, 11th run of this presentation that I'm doing, because that's a recent one. Yeah. And so I was, it was like 11 o'clock at night. And so right now, I'm working triple shifts, which is not common for me. I usually do two, not three. Um, so for me, a normal work day is like, I wake up, uh, I start working at, you know, six or seven, and then I go until about six ish. So it's like 10 to 12 really concentrated of hours work. And that I can do six and a half days a week. I usually take Saturday afternoons off. Um, and it's really just because at that point, I can't work anymore, and my brain stew. And then I, I get my one half day, and then I'm good to go, and I'm rearing to kick on, you know, to work on Sundays. My triple shift is, I get, I go to dinner, and I come back at 7:30, and then I work from 7:30 until 11:30 or 1, or whatever, right? And when I'm putting in triple shifts, is when I know I'm like, really gassing it. Um, and that's, that's what I'm like, repeatedly doing 16, 17 hours a day of actual productive work. And I, I hear the same thoughts that everyone does, which is like, "It's not gonna matter. Like, it's fine. You've, like, it's good enough." Like, I hate that. Like, it makes me sick to even say that, right? Because the thing that I, like David Goggins, right? He's got like, "There's no shortcuts for you." I would say the one that I have, two that are like my internal ones. One that is probably the most common is, "I will do what is required." And this work needs doing, and there's just no way around it. And it's just, it's just looking at the face of the work, and it's like smiling back at me, like, "No one else is going to do it." Um, and like, I love that one. Like, when we're recording content in the early days, we were doing like, 100 shorts every time we did it, and it was direct to camera. And it was the only time I could fit it in with all the portfolio stuff that we're doing. And so I was, it was always like, "I will do what's required." And that's been a really helpful refrain for me when I'm confronted with, especially when you know what needs to get done. And the second one is, "But I'll know." And so like, even if it does go well, and even if everyone else says it's great, but I'll know. And it'll then rob me of all of the joy of all of those moments in that experience, because I'll know that I could have done better. And the thing is, it's like, to, to quote myself from earlier, like, "I've never regretted working harder, ever. Not once." And some people, like, on your deathbed, you're like, "No, because I lived every moment of my day doing what I wanted to do." And I remember I had a boss when I, um, my first boss after college, she said this thing. I had had a particularly good weekend. And she said, "I'm pretty sure happiness is stringing as many of those days in a row as you possibly can." And although I hated the job, that piece of advice has actually been probably what I, has been my blueprint for how to live, which is like, my birthday looks the same as my Tuesdays, which looks the same as my Sundays. You know what the

The original name pool for this podcast was "This is the Only Time in History." I've done branding my entire adult life, and with club nights, all you're doing is coming up with brands. Paradiso? Oh, it's tropical. There'll be a flamingo. A skint? Oh, it's a cheap night. It's for people to get fingered in the corner. Like, it's, we all I did was branding, right? I was a branding guy. I'm pretty good at copywriting. All I did was branding.

The one time I've had divine inspiration, three in the morning, wake up with the name was "Modern Wisdom." The one time out of every business, every night, every brand I've ever come up with, that was the one time. But on the list of the others, "Mind Mind and Matter" was one of them. The other one was a quote from Tim Ferriss. It's called "Crushing a Tuesday." And he said that what you should aim for in life is for your average Tuesday, not the spectacular one-time private jet with the friends to go for the whatever, whatever, not the UFC power slap launch party, staring at the back of Dan Bilzerian's dirty mullet. Like, not that. You want your average Tuesday to look the way that you want most of your life to do.

And when I think about the days that I look back on at the end of my day and think, like, "Today was a good day," invariably, it's the same few things. It's, I worked very hard on something that I felt was worth doing. I worked out. And I spent time with people that I enjoy being around. If I do those three things, I had a good day. And so that's been my, you know, Alex's simple blueprint for doing things.

And I think the point that you were making earlier, I think it's worth hitting on again, which is just that, like, most people's definition of work is a negative one, which is why they abhor it. Which is also why they misunderstand so many people who, quote, I'll say quote here, are successful or ahead of them or whatever. Is that both people, one person says the word "work," and the other person hears the word "pain." And so the first step to, like, becoming more successful is understanding the language that the people who are successful are using. They're actually defining the word differently.

And so whatever that thing is that you actually enjoy doing, where you lose track of time when you're in it, even if it's challenging, but usually it is challenging, right? Like, it's not easy because then it's boring, right? Which is also why the uncertainty thing is so key, right? To not knowing if it's going to, if it's going to work or not. You are going to work, though, either way. Um, is that the people who are quote "addicted to work" make it easy to be addicted to work because they do things worth doing. And I think a lot of it is coming down to making sure that you take the few precious seconds that we have to do the few things that are worth doing for the rest of your life.

The more I listen to this, the better my life gets. If they don't have what you want, don't listen to what they say. There's no greater waste of time than justifying your actions to people who have a life you don't want. That was a message to my younger self. But, um, I remember I got it in, well, I won't, I won't call it out. Um, let me see how I can say this the right way. Um, you know what? I'll just say it. I'll whitewash the names.

So I was with a family member, and we were all around the kitchen table, starting the holidays, because I don't go home very much. And they kind of started attacking me. Um, and they're like, "I would never live your life. You're so unbalanced." Like, attacking. And I was like, "What are you saying?" And she said, "I, I just would never do that." And I was like, "All right, well, what part of my life is unbalanced?" I was like, "Do you feel like my health is unbalanced? I was like, "Do you feel like my marriage is unbalanced? I was like, "Do you feel like my finances are unbalanced?" I was like, "What part of my life do you feel like is out of whack?" She was like, "You know, I'm not as good with words as you are." And that was the, and I was like, "Okay, so the fact that you can't make a logical argument, I'm not going to continue how that conversation went."

But the, the TL;DR of that was, I really thought a lot about it, and it came down to, "I wouldn't live your life." And my response to that is, "Good. Don't. It's not your life. It's mine. Live yours the way you want." And I wouldn't live your life either. And so what ends up happening is they become these statements, these projections, that are not actually real. Now, on some level, maybe they were saying that because there was envy in that aspect of like, wishing that was there, you know, that they were living that life. But in this particular instance, I don't think it was. I think they genuinely were trying to help. It was a family member, and they thought they were, that I was being misguided.

"This is an intervention. Let me hold the talking pillow. Alex, we've all come together because we care about you. We really feel like we need to have a conversation here." It's, it's exactly what it was. And I got so angry. You so angry. No. And you know, you can hear Layla like patting my back like it's, I'm like, "See? You can feel the heat coming off of me. It's like I'd go upstairs. How dare she?" You know? But it really just came down to like her just saying, "I don't want to live your life." And I think the answer to that question is, "Good. Don't."

And I think that has been one of the things that has diffused so many of these like hateful comments where people dehumanize you or whatever and make you into this idea that they reject. It's like, "You're right." One of the things that, uh, I had a mentor told me to say is like, when you're in an argument, if somebody's like, "It's like, you're, you're a terrible person," blah, blah, blah, you just say, "You're right." And then they have no, they have nothing to say. And then you just move on with your life. And so like, in that way, it's acceptance. But of like, your, your idea of who I am that you hate so much, I accept it. I can live with that. Even, but like, we don't want to think, "What if I haven't? I don't believe that." But I can do that. And I can end the conversation.

So I'm taking improv classes at the moment because I'm doing my first live shows in the UK and Ireland. Oh, so this live talk. Thank you. Uh, "Everything Exists." No solo stood on stage for 90 minutes, comedy, insights, and stuff. Probably some that I've learned today. Uh, anyway, we released it, and every show sold out, and then got venue upgraded, and then sold out again in less than 45 minutes across all of the dates, which was great. But then scary, because I now had to speak to like three times as many people per night for additional nights on top of what I thought.

Anyway, I'm doing improv. In improv, there is one rule, and the rule is, "Don't punk the game." So, we're doing some exercise where we need to make silly noises as we pass this imaginary energy around. And I need to go like, "Boeing," and send it back. And you need to go, "Whoosh," and pass it on. And all this sort of. The one thing that you're not allowed to do is not make one of the noises that's allowed. Yeah. And I really think about punking the game an awful lot. And you see it happen in podcasts, you see it happen on TV, you see it happen. And it can be both destructive and constructive, but it's always destructive to the people that are trying to play the game. And it can sometimes be constructive to the person who is punking it.

So what you did is you punked the game. That we are playing a game of tennis. We are hitting the ball back and forth here. I go, I hit the ball across the net. And oh, where is it? Is it? Hit it back. Hit it. Hit it back to me. Yeah, like this is the game that we're playing. And you didn't move reciprocally back and forth. You went orthogonally. You went across on a different axis. And you're like, "I'm not playing this anymore. This is a different game." I'm not bothered. There's not even words to describe what that means now.

The way that it can be destructive is, especially if you're having, let's say, a meaningful conversation. Sometimes people who are uncomfortable with getting into their emotions can use a variety of different things. They can be scathing, they can be mocking, they can laugh, you know, because they don't want to sit with the discomfort of this particular part of the conversation. That's punking the game in a way that I think is destructive, both externally and internally. That was one that was destructive externally. It broke the game, but it was constructive internally.

And it is a way, refusing to play by the rules that somebody else has set in a game that you didn't agree to, is the best prophylactic against stepping into a situation that you do not want. And it's one of the things that wealth affords. And it's one of the things that freedom affords. And freedom is often downstream from wealth.

Remember George, one of my really good friends, being on the show like five times. George Mack. You'll follow him on Twitter. He's phenomenal. He was on Fox and Friends yesterday talking about his cocaine phone and his kale phone. Like, what? What world is this? Yeah. I remember before the first time that I moved away to work. I've been, I've traveled a lot, but it was always in between work. I never traveled to work. COVID happens. World gets shut down just after Halloween. Boris tells all of the UK we're going back into lockdown in three days' time, and all flights are canceled. So I messaged George and I was like, "I'm not doing this. I'm, let's go somewhere." He wanted to go to, I can't, I can't even remember, some island that has 300,000 people on it. And I was like, "Why don't we do Dubai? It's a five-hour flight. The weather's great. I know people. It'll be fun. It's not got 300,000 people on it. It'll be the zuba."

And I'll never forget what he replied to me with. I got up and I paid 350 pounds for my COVID fit-to-fly test before he was awake. But he'd sent me a message the night before, and this is what compelled me to do. He said, "What's the point in having your freedom if you never say 'you'?" And I was like, I was so fired up reading that message. And I was like, "Yeah, why have I put all of this work in? Why have I done all of these things if I don't ever punk a game that I didn't agree to be a part of?"

I think this is really big. If we go all the way back to the earlier part of this podcast, when you have the friends who are telling you, "Oh, must be nice," or "You think you're better than us," or "Oh, so we can't drink anymore?" That's when you be like, "Yeah, then what? Well, then we wouldn't be friends." You're not going to be friends with them eventually anyway, I promise you. Anyone who says that. So you're not going to be friends with. If you want to ultimately become the person you want to become, they're only going to reject you harder and harder until eventually you have nothing to share about. And the only thing that you'll talk about is the past. Which, by the way, one of the great leading indicators of, at least in my opinion, of a great way to know when to cut a friend is when they only talk about your past.

And so punking the game, and it's, it's one of those really uncomfortable things the first time you do it, but then you get more and more comfortable with it. Because they're like, "I would never live your life." And you're like, "I know." This relates to another one of yours. Don't trade your self-respect for someone else's. It's easy to lose theirs and hard to get yours back. Yeah, but I would know. But you would know. Yeah.

Uh, related to the sort of cynicism thing that we were talking about earlier on, I call it the cynicism safety blanket, the sour grapes at an existential level. You've been on "My First Million." He casually dropped this. I don't think this, I don't think his episode's going to be out before this goes. Um, but it's money. And he said, "The cynics get to be right, and the optimists get to be rich." From you, I think the winner's mindset sits in the uncomfortable place between two surface-level contradictions: extreme paranoia in the present and unshakable faith in the future. The tension between the two makes someone hard to beat today and hard to outlast tomorrow. The cynics get to be right, and the optimists get to be rich.

One of the biggest fallacies of the advice from people who are in your current situation is that they are right most of the time. When you bring a girl home, 99 times out of 100, when your parents say, "She's not the girl. I don't like her. She won't last," they're right every single time except for the one time it matters, and you end up marrying the person. Right? Like when they say, "Like, you're not going to succeed. Like, this idea of yours, it's not going to last." And they're right every single time except for the one time that matters, when you hit it big. And so it's one of those things where they are right more times, but they are not more ripe. So good. Yeah.

I wonder whether it's a function of all of our opinions being permanently etched in stone on social media that it's very easy to seem smart to have a heterodox idea if you go against the mainstream because it's romantic. "Oh, I, I, I had this alternative. I had this negative. I'm not, I'm not like one of those sheep. I'll, I'll believe that things are going to be worse than they are." And then if it turns out better, guess what I say? "Your expectations super low. Congratulations. You can thank me later." You're like, "That is distilled down British culture at its worst." Yeah. Is low expectations. Low expectations delivered through satirical cynicism.

"Why are you doing that? That's lame. That's for losers. That's something that we wouldn't do. You should stop doing the different thing. Tall poppy. You're the one that gets cut down." And it's all that. It's like, all it shows to me now is a kind of group thing, almost like the worst kind of mental telepathy where everybody believes the most unuseful thoughts that everybody else has. Yeah, at scale. And all it does is lower the bar that you need to get up.

I think it's that, that "you're right" thing, which is someone says, "That's lame. That sucks." Blah, blah, blah. And you say, "Like, you're right. It does." You just keep punking the game. Like when anyone comes to try and like, like they're they're playing a different game than you. So you shouldn't try and play by their rules because they're going to try and get you to play their game so that they can beat you at the game, which is the status game of that little circle. But you're playing a much wider game that includes more players. And so even though locally you have these, your your incoming information that you're taking in is disproportionate with your people that you're not actually playing against. And so it's basically just noise. It's irrelevant.

Because if you look on a long enough time horizon, the likely that you're act, like, I mean, again, I think about death a lot. But the, the idea that when I die, people will be dividing up my assets, arguing over who gets what. There's going to be a caterer at my funeral. Some people won't make it because something came up and they got busy. And then the few people that are there are probably no one that I have in my life right now. And the fact that every single person that I have in my life might not even make it to the funeral to speak over me while I'm dead. It's like, why on earth would I listen to them while I'm alive? Like, they can't even make it to probably the single most important, you know, personal day of someone's life is someone's funeral, right? The one time you can pay your last respects, and they don't even do that. And so it's like, why would I give any weight to what these people are doing when they're not even going to be there on the day that matters most? And six months later, they're not even remember who I was.

And anybody who's had a death in their family recently knows that in the moment, it's terrible for you. And then six months later, life moves on. But the thing is, is that we just never paint ourselves as the person who dies. But to me, that's incredibly freeing. Because then it's like, if six months after I'm dead, no one is going to say my name, no one is going to remember what I did, then no one's gonna, then it doesn't matter what I do today. And I think that some people see it as really hopeless, but I see it as very hopeful. Because it means we have absolute freedom. And we can do crazy. Like, why have you money if you can't say "you"?

Learning isn't a spectator sport. It comes from doing, which means if you're not doing the stuff you consume every day, you're not learning. You're just procrastinating. Oh, this is fine. All right. So I'm going to define some terms. Learning. Let me say this way, intelligence means rate of learning. Like that's what that's how. Remember I talk about operationalizing words? So rate of learning is intelligence. So then you, which means it's a rate, not an attribute, as an aside. Which then means you have to define learning. Learning means same condition, new behavior. So if I hold up a red card and then I slap you, and then I hold up a red card again, and then you duck, you've learned. If you wake up every day and life shows you a red card, and then you don't duck, and you don't change, then you have learned nothing. And so if you go to a weekend, and you go to a workshop, and then the next day you go back and you do the exact same activities in the same conditions, and you have no new behavior, it means you learned nothing. It also means you're stupid, because it means your rate of learning is slow.

So if someone is intelligent, I can show them the red card, and on the first go, they change their behavior. And so by defining intelligence that way, and defining learning that way, it allowed me to start thinking, "Well, I want to be smart." And this circumstance had this outcome last time. And so the next time I see this circumstance, this red card, I'm going to change my behavior. And so when we consume the information that you have on this podcast or whatever it is, there's probably a circumstance, whether it's a conversation that you're supposed to have, but you aren't having it. It's a decision that you need to make, but you're putting off. That's the red card. It comes up again. And the question is whether you're going to get slapped, or you're going to duck. And that's where you know whether you learned or not. And every time you get shown the red card and you do the same exact thing, you just prove to yourself that your rate of learning is slower. And so for me, I want to have that evidence that I learn quickly. And for me, that's why like people see me as ruthless, as you said, because I'm willing to cut relationships. Because if I think that I'm going to eventually cut the relationship, then why would I not cut it today? Because I might as well start enjoying the benefits of cutting that relationship as soon as humanly possible.

Alex Hormozi, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, I love you to bits. I genuinely do. Uh, I, I think the work that you put out, the messages that you put out, are very, very needed. And yeah, I could do this for days. We could run this back literally for days and days and days. So, uh, this is going to go out after your big event. Where should people go to support you, to learn more about the work that you do, and, and what have you got coming up?

Well, I've got my, uh, my next book, "100 Million Dollar Leads." The first book is "100 Million Dollar Offers." What's an interesting question? What should I sell? So a lot of people are like, "What should I sell?" It tells you step-by-step everything you do, like worksheets. I have a free course that goes with it. You don't even have to opt in. It's on my site, acquisition.com. You can just start watching it. Um, I think the Kindle for "Offers" is $1.99. Like, try to make, I mean, our mission is to make real business education accessible for everyone.

"100 Leads" has been six hours a day, 6 a.m. to 12, 12 p.m. every day for the last two years. So the first six hours of every day has been dedicated to writing that book, which is why I have 19 drafts, four, four, four full rewrites. There's 106 hand-drawn images that went in the book that I put in there. Um, and I'm going to be releasing it at this event that Chris and I were talking about. Um, so you're going to be listening to this after that event. Um, and so you can go on Amazon, it'll be available there, or you can look at acquisition.com because they'll be a course and things that you can go through, free materials. And that, the, the "100 Million Dollar Leads" answers the question, "Who do I sell it to?" And so you need leads, right? So you're like, "Okay, great. I have the thing I'm gonna sell. Who? How do I go get people to find out about it?" And so a lot of the things that I have in the book are defining some of the terms that people hear a lot, which is like, what is a lead? What is advertising? Right? Advertising is the process of making known. And so if no one knows about your stuff, no one can buy it. And so the reverse of that is everyone knows about your stuff. And that book will show you how to get everyone to know about your stuff.

And the reason I made the event as big as I did was because I used every advertising method in the book to advertise the book itself. So "Offers" was an example of a grand slam offer. How do you make something so good everyone feels stupid saying no, which is the sub-headline of the book. And so "Offers" in and of itself was a grand slam offer, which is what I argue that everyone should have. It was a two-dollar book that it comes with a course, it comes with worksheets, all these things. And "100 Leads," the way that I wanted to exemplify and meta-show, demonstrate that the concept of the book works today, and will work tomorrow, and will work in 100 years, is because humans haven't changed. And so the process of making known remains the same because our hard wiring is the same. So you don't need to know the Instagram hack because my first ever advertisement was on Facebook, and I don't do anything on Facebook now, and it doesn't matter. And as soon as YouTube and podcasts and all those things die, the principles remain the same despite the platforms changing. And so that is what I wrote each of these books because I want them to be around in 100 years. And that's why I spent so long on them. Um, but I'm very proud of the book, and I think it's my best work to date.

Alex, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thank you. Oh, hey, if you enjoyed that episode with Alex Hormozi, then press here for the one that we did six months ago, which goes for a full another two hours. Go on, press it.